It's never easy, is it?
Spent 4 to 5 hours last night poncing about with the machine.
Installed mobo, RAM, CPU, HSF in case. The Dell has 2 HDDs, 2 optical drives & a floppy - only bothered to install the main boot HD & the DVD-ROM.
Booted up ... BSOD before it got into XP. Whipped out the XP CD and did a Repair Install. Surprisingly it just asked for the CD key. HOWEVER it took nearly 2 hours to do the install...
Now booted into XP and ITS SLOW AS HELL, so slow its unusable 'cos it's so unresponsive, e.g. takes a minute to open Control Panel. In fact I set the FSB down from 133 to 100 (so CPU now a 2300) but still same story.
So I'm trying to narrow the possibilities:
- surely has nothing to do with the fact there's no floppy, even though BIOS moans
- maybe it's unhappy about not having the other HD & DVD writer in the other IDE channels? doubtful
- thermal throttling? but the temps look fine; not sure how hot the NB is though - don't have a probe.
- or the XP install is now shafted with old drivers hanging about & getting loaded? Sounds most likely and quite possible, no?
I think I'm going to shove in the floppy and boot off my Partition Magic disks to try and create a small primary partition on the HD. Will then do a fresh XP install there and see if that boots OK.
If it does then I'll backup anything I've forgotten about and format the whole disk and start again.
If it doesn't, then sh*t, I'm stuffed.