Hi After getting advise from a previous thread on how to replace the thermal paste on my graphics card I went and did so as I thought my gaming freezes were being caused by the heat of my GPU. However after logging the temps the GPU is doesn't go above 60 degrees C. My problem only occurs when trying to play a game. I try to load it up, the hard drive light goes crazy for a few seconds, then nothing. The screen freezes and the HDD light goes out, forcing a restart. While the HDD is going like mad, I can really hear the hard drive working hard, but its not an abnormal sound so im unsure if its at fault. Other things that might help: CPU and GPU temps are within reasonable margins. I have 2 80GB drives, the games are on my primary drive (with OS (windows XP Pro)). If any one could help that would be great as its getting a little frustrating now. Thanks Gaz
How long you had the drive(s) for? I'm assuming they're quite old if they are 80Gb. It really sounds like you have a dying hardrive, maybe its time for an SSD
Yeah they are very old, both IDE, so im guessing 5 years +. Do you know of any SATA II drives that will be backwards combatible to sata I (150mb/s) ?
It can be a bit iffy. I threw a WD 1TB Caviar Black into my old P4 system and had intermittent issues with it detecting the drive. Supposedly they are meant to negotiate with the motherboard to determine the SATA version. Easy fix, though. There were pins that you could add a jumper to that forced SATA I. I imagine other drives would have something similar, but I don't know for sure.
