Problem solved! (aka. ZA Pro sucks)

Apparently the problem was related to my upgrade to Zone Alarm Pro. I haven't started trying to figure out what the specific issue was but with ZA off and the standard firewall back on performance is back to it's normal self. I'll post more information as I get it but for the mean time if someone can suggest a better firewall I'd greatly appreciate it.

The problems continue

I cloned the hard drive over the last couple of days; it actually took that long because of the read speed of the drive. The fact that it took that long leads me to believe that this problem may be a hardware issue but witching the drives out didn't do anything to help the issue.

I'm very close to just turning this $1300 desk weight into a tech center and letting them pound their heads on it for a while.

New HD reading at a BLAZING 0.4 mbs

The following is the description of the wondrous journey of a new HPm7674n its 200gb Seagate drive that's dropping down to 0.4mbs. The problem wasn't terribly noticeable at first but has seemed to get worse and worse as the months have gone by.

I originally posted the problem on the microsoft here. I got a couple of good suggestions and follow up information from the two people who replied and that set me off on a long series of tests in order to try and find out what was going on. Unfortunately the problem is persisting and I've decided to move a lot of the information associated with the problem to here so I can post more than I could on a message group.

The system is running Zone Alarm Pro and the generic microsoft malware program from their support site so I feel relatively confidant in saying that this is not a virus or spyware issue. The problem manifests itself in INCREDIBLY long loading times for applications and in some case documents. Startup can take anywhere from 5 - 10 minutes as all of the services and applications load. From the initial post and information published on the XP group I thought we had a winner in the drive potentially having been switched from DMA to PIO due to disk errors. Unfortunately everything I checked indicates that the drives remain in UDMA-5 and the CPU looks untouched when the disk is reading.

There have been a couple of "weird" problems with the HP since I picked it up several months ago. The ESCI was setup with resource conflicts between some drivers and devices and had to be reset manually. Presumably this was done during the setup of the machine at the factory and was never reset to the represent the new devices. While trying to find anything else that may have been causing this issue I did note that the bios was set up to recognize the dual 200gb drives as raid disks but the raid controller from Intel as part of the Intel Application Accelerator didn't have any raid partitions created. Some sources suggested that it might be the IAA itself that would cause these kinds of atrociously slow read times so I uninstalled it, still without making any kind of a difference. Now that IAA is gone though I can at least directly access the drive properties through the Device Manager to check on their setup.

So far I've rescanned the computer for viruses and malware, checked the fragmentation level, reset the BIOS to non-raid and from AHCI to IDE, uninstalled IAA, and run HD Tune and HD Tach both of which confirm that drive performance is dropping to <1mbs> Just to answer another question: The free space on the drive is roughly 25% at 44.9gb of a 200gb drive.

If anyone can provide some assistance or ideas on how to go about resolving this problem I would extraordinarily grateful.

For a sense of what I'm seeing look below...


This is the view of the CPU stats from task manager while one of those ridiculously slow reads is taking place. At the time this was taken the HD was below 1mbs.










And in case someone notices anything that escaped my attention here is the shot of all running processes and information from task manager when this was going on.













Full System Info:
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.070227-2254)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: HP Pavilion 061
System Model: RK505AA-ABA m7674n
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM


Error Logs:
I have a TON of identical errors under IntelDH
"Could not attach to EL Acpi driver."
IntelQRTD ID 7

I'm also getting a ton of errors in the system event log for
"The Remote Access Connection Manager service depends on the Telephony service which failed to start because of the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. "
Service Control Manager ID 7001

Again, ANY help would be appreciated here