Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
Certainly the price reductions in the newer technology makes it easier to justify the upgrades.
However I had an incident a few years ago where keeping computers till they break would be a very silly idea - I had a four year old desktop PC from emachines and the hard drive controller simply could not keep up. ... I replaced the PC and the new one, with a new controller, could easily keep up with the software. So that's one incident where replacement when it breaks does not make sense, the older technology could no longer do the job.
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That was probably NOT a hardware problem. Windows XP had a known problem where the hard drive access MODE could fall back to SOFTWARE I/O (extremely slow) and it would stay there. There was a registry change that could fix it to advance to faster modes after successful reads.
Slow drive speed can also be caused by a badly fragmented drive (needing degragmenting), or by a lot of disk activity such as from a virus checker. It is especially bad if you had TWO virus checkers scanning a drive, because that would thrash the drive heads making it extremely slow.
Your slow drive was VERY probably a SOFTWARE problem and not "slow drive controller". Modern SATA hard drives can be held back a bit by an add-on SATA controller plugged into a PCI slot, but still faster than older IDE drives.
Your new computer came without that software problem, of course, but restoring the old computer back to factory defaults would probably make its hard drive fast again too.