Lagging XP during downloading?!!

[Nightmonster]

Hi,

please could somebody help me? I dont know where is the problem.

If I downloading about 6-12MB/s the whole PC started lagging. I cant even play music, or write a text... it is incredibly slow.

This has happened also at my NTB - but I didnt try to solve it - it is yust a NTB.

But I have new PC: CPU: Phenom II 940, MB: GIGABYTE GA-MA790Gp - UD4H, RAM: 4GB DDR2 A-DATA, HDD1: Seagate 250GB-there I have windows XP, HDD2: Samsung F1 1TB, PSU: Silverstone 500Watt

- any ideas? thx

[Dencandy]

I would say it's not unusual to experience a significant decrease in the speed at which other applications can work when you are downloading at speeds like that. It's because your CPU & other parts are working very hard. However if you think there might be another problem you can check by opening the performance monitor: Control Panel > Performance & Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Performance.

[Katy]

Dencandy I have to correct you on that: the CPU works way under 10% when downloading. It's only transfering data from network to disk. An overloaded CPU would perform something heavy, like compression or rendering some graphics.

My guess is that there is something wrong with the disk access. Nightmonster, you might wanna check the disk access mode, should be DMA (if you are using IDE compatibility for the SATA controllers, in MB's BIOS).

I had a similar issue with more than one PC and it dissapeared when I manually forced the disk from PIO to DMA. On some Windows installations that will be ignored, the disk will stay in PIO mode no matter what. Why, I do not know. I usualy solve that situation with older or newer drivers for the MB's chipset.