Hey Vogons,

Magic Dave here... I got a puzzle for you Vogons!

I found these mid-size black box pcs from early 2000s at a thrift store... for... wait for it. $25 a piece.
So I'm on my way to building a 6 way PC early 2000 permanent LAN. Hooray!

I have one of these PCs that I installed WinXP, and its super snappy.

But I have one PC that had slow a WinXP, format and install. Once it was installed I had random audio glitches and then I zeroed in on that it was simply stuttering in performance in any 3d Game. Stuttering like every couple of seconds... Seemed this increased intensity in since I got it running... didn't remember any initial issues.

So here we go... I think its the hard drive, I had to change the BIOS for initial install from ACHI to IDE to make WinXp work. But the drive was loose in the case... So I straight up replaced it with what I had, a 1TB SATA HD

Reinstalled WinXP.

And it takes FOREVER... like a whole night to install.

SO next steps... RAM? (two sticks- 8gigs) I re-insert the RAM. Move it around. (Don't have another 1600 to test with)
Still slow. Like so slow it takes about 30 mins to boot into winxp and even then its unusable.
So I can't even get to a memory test program... ugh.

So I dive into the bios disabling any advance features. No change.

Even Safe Mode is not Safe. Unusable.

I remove the graphics card, disconnect everything from the Motherboard. USBs and ALL. Still slow.

So do I just have a lemon? Is this a CPU dying? According to ASUS bios... The CPU is sitting at a lovely 38c.

The crazy thing is the other PC box has the same specs... And I think the same BIOS version (1201) Which I will check when I can.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance Gang!