Hard Drive Rev Up

[lpars114]

I have a Compaq Presario 5330US with (2) 256MB Ram cards (max possible is 1.5GB)  & a Western Digital 1.6GB hard drive.  Everything OK except some gaming slow due to data flow with hard drive.  Installed additional 512MB RAM that is supposedly for this specific machine from Kahlon.  On power up, BIOS accepted RAM change & as machine booted, hard drive rev'ed up full.  XP Task Mgr indicated little use of memory.  Tried reboot but hard drive would not slow down and reboot very slow as if data being transferred.  Shutdown, removed new 512MB card & restarted.  On restart, everything back to "normal".  Tried installing new 512MB card again and got same result.  Removed new card 2nd time, but since then machine not the same.  On boot up, machine will come up well with no loss of performance, but after up, the hard drive will spin up to high RPM's on slightest provocation and stay at high RPM's for extended period with machine performance very sluggish. Eventually, speed will slow down but return to high speed in computer applications that previously did not involve hard drive use (based on sound).  Left unattended last night after speed had settled down, I heard the drive speed up for awhile before idling back down.

I will appreciate any help on what has happened and what I can do to get the machine back to where it was.  I have abandoned the idea of RAM increase at this point.

[IT-Guy]

Are you serious about using a 1.6 GB hard drive with a gig of RAM??  No wonder it's having trouble... Don't you have a larger hdd?  A gig of ram needs a larger page file... which it won't find if you only have a 1.6 gig hard drive.

[lpars114]

Sorry about that - hard drive is 160 GB.

[IT-Guy]

 thought so.. I just wanted to clear that up...

Do you have windows managing your page file?  Sometimes you have to go in and manually set your page file to a larger size (should be 1.5 X the Memory)

Are you sure it's your drive making the noise?  And I'm a bit confused about your troubleshooting... did you say you tried both sets of memory alone?  ie.. the new 512 by itself?

[lpars114]

XP is now set to manage and it is set at 767MB.  I have tried various manual settings with no success.  On my 3rd attempt, I did try the new 512 card by itself and then the original 2x256 cards.  In these attempts, HD would rev but not as high as when new and old cards installed together.  I am sure that it is the WD hard drive.  I have a 2nd 30GB slave HD installed and I have tried disabling it to make sure that it is not the culprit with no success.  I have been on the net tonight via Earthlink DSL and while shopping (no downloads), the HD would speed up/slow down.  I have run the Western Digital diagnostics on the HD & got an OK report in all respects.   I have as much of the processes and start routines in msconfig as I dare shut down to reduce resource drain.   As I type this, the HD has settled down again, but it could rev up any minute based on the way it has been behaving.  All and all, it appears to be somewhat better in that when it revs, seems to rev more like 1/2 speed vs full speed.  It's still annoying as it does impact operations and it definitely revs at times where it didn't used to.  My wife has confirmed.  Thanks for the responses so far.  Oops, it's revving up again slightly.