Hi all, I am working on a computer here that came in with many problems. We removed lots of spyware and the such, and now the machine is clean. The problem is that no matter what you are doing, the hard drive activity light is on. It also seems to be slow in executing processes. Any ideas that you all might have would be great, we've tried everything. Thanks in advance and God Bless.

Tony, "...we've tried everything." Hmm, an idea of "everything", and "manny problems" would be nice. Just a guess, on the LED. The connector for the LED, is reversed. One of the devices power con...... Any problems, in Device Manager? Any problems showing, at the Performance (Tab), in System properties? Is/are all devices (IDE) working correctly? Has the OS had any/all updates from micr_soft? Is the LED blinking, dimly illuminated, brightly illuminated? Any drive overlay installed? Is it still illuminated, if you do a Ctrl+Alt+Delete {click "Cancel" after checking}? Have you reinstalled updated drivers, after the cleanup? ect. Plenty of questions, when you don't know what has been done, or checked/tried.

Hi Crazy, thanks for the response. To answer your questions... No, there are no problems being shown in the performance tab or in the device manager. Yes, we have run Windows update and installed all available critical and driver updates (basically all of them except the language support). The LED blinks on and off slightly when there is actual hard drive activity, but otherwise it is brightly illuminated constantly. I did dig into the machine shortly after posting last time and noticed that this hard drive has an activity indicator light on itelf (as in the body of the drive). This light is not on constantly like the one that shows on the outside of the tower. So my thinking is that somehow the LED on the ouside of the tower was hooked up wrong. Thanks again for your help. -Tony

There could be several things. Trust the LED on the drive. The front panel LED represents all activity on the IDE channels. There could be a problem with one of the other drives, such as a CD-Rom drive, or on some of the Compaq systems, the Diskette drive if it is one of the type they use that plug into the IDE cable. First try booting with a Windows ME startup diskette and see if disk access is as fast as it should be in DOS and if the LED indicator works correctly. If it does not, you will have to try unplugging any CD-Rom and the diskette interface, so you just have the disk drive connected and see it that isolates the problem. If things work in DOS OK, then try booting it into Safe Mode and see how it runs. If that is OK with normal performance of the disk drive, but it has problems in normal mode, it could be a hardware problem with the system board. There is a common problem with those older Compaq systems with damage to the IDE channel controls. They will run just fine in PIO (DOS and Safe Mode) but run slow or fail in UDMA mode. Look at the capacitors around where the IDE cables plug in. If any are swelled or have leaked, the corrosive dark compounds damage or short out the electronics. Try cleaning any you see up. When this type of problem happens, sometimes you can get it to work by changing the Compaq default of CS or Cable Select for the drives, to a MS/SL configuration. Keep in mind, that the diskette could also be a CS/MS/SL device on the IDE bus.

Tony, To add, even if the floppies data cable isn't installed correctly {reversed, wrong connector on the cable}, it would cause this. ect. ;-) Hope it all gets worked out, in the end. Good Luck, CrazyOne

The floppy drive/cable will not effect the IDE LED, the two are totally separate. Also if the connector for the LED were reversed, it would not cause the light to stay on, in fact it would be just the opposite. It wouldn't come on at all.

Kurt, To check/verify what I said in my last post about the cable. I reversed/flipped the data cable, and indeed the LED stayed illuminated(bright). {BIOS is saying, where did it go, I'm looking ;-)} That's this motherboard anyway. Well, not this exact one. But, the same in another tower.