I just recived a new system from Alienware. I blow away XP and through on slackware. I seem to have every thing working ok X, many sound blaster audigy, nvidia drivers w/ 3d acceration. but my system seems to hang whenever I transfer data from anything on to a hard drive or I compile anything. Hell, it'll studder when typing commands in to the console without X running.

Here are the system specs (easier to paste from order):

Aurora DDR
~ Case: Dragon Full-Tower Case (340-Watt PS) (Space Black)
~ Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Processor 266Mhz FSB
~ Cooling Fan/Heatsink: GlobalWIN WBK38 Processor Cooling Fan
~ Memory: 1GB DDR SDRAM (PC-2100)
~ Keyboard: 107-Enhanced Windows Keyboard (Space Black)
~ Mouse: Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer USB (Space Black)
~ Hard Drive: 100GB HD 8.9ms seek time, 7200RPM 8MB Cache, UltraATA
~ Secondary Hard Drive: 100GB HD 8.9ms seek time, 7200RPM 8MB
Cache, UltraATA
~ Monitor: NEC 22" FE1250+ MultiSync Flat CRT - Black
~ Video Card: VisionTek Xtasy 6964? GeForce3 Ti 500 w/64MB 4X AGP
~ Video Cooling: KoolMaxx Video Cooling System
~ Sound Card: SoundBlaster Audigy 5.1 Gamer
~ DVD-ROM: 16X /40X DVD-ROM Drive w/Software MPEG-2 Decoder
~ CD-RW: PlexWriter 24X/10X/40X CD-ReWritable - IDE - White
~ Speakers: Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 500-Watt THX Speakers & Sub -
Black
~ Ethernet NIC: On-board 10/100 BaseT Ethernet/Fast Ethernet


I can olny assume it has some thing to do with the ultra ATA drives. (This is the 1st time I've used a system with ultra ATA)

current Kernel 2.4.18
base slackware install 8.0

Thanks for any help you can give, A system like this has no right to run like this.
and thanks for putting up with my bad spelling and grammer

Arovin

Your 'puter gives me chill bumps.
I read somewhere once that linux defaults to ata 33.
Try hdparm -X 69 /dev/hda
as SU of course.....................that is supposed to set it to ultra dma mode 5.
good luck.........................hope this works for you.

I did what you suggested and it it didn't seem to work, then I read the man page for hdparm and realized DMA was not enabled on the drive.

hdpram -d1 /dev/hda

That seemed to fix it, thanks alot.

Arovin

Add this to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and see if this speeds things up: hdparm -c1 -m16 -d1 /dev/hxx

Hope this helps.