Recently we got a new piece of hardware in the bureau here, however it's a problematic one too.

After going through hell and back to get Win98 drivers for all the onboard devices, I found out that the damn thing has all the speed of a stunned turtle, even though the CPU is a decent Celeron 400. Heck, my old P133 was running faster then this thing. Especially any harddrive operations (load, write etc) take nearly an eternity (for me it means about 2 minutes) to execute.

I found traces in the BIOS that someone (presumably the last IT before me who touched it) has tried BIOS-based overclocking to 533 Mhz, naturally in order to keep safe I turned it down to normal level of 400 Mhz.

The motherboard is PcChips M748LRMT.

What might be the cause of the slowdown? Can it be eliminated?

First of all, if they've been fiddling with the BIOS, how about restoring it entirely? If that wasn't what you did. Second, you might wanna try out a harddrive speed benchmarking tool? Slow harddrive, slow machine... 400mhz and all sounds good so that's the first thing that comes to mind, I had a similar problem with my *erhem* replaced XBOX harddrive :whistle:

Edit:
You could try this one for example, easy tool. Plenty of others there too if you want.

Perhaps you need to press the Turbo button. :blink:

Drivers for the motherboard? Usually if yours are old (or default) you can improve a lot. Of a BIOS update?

maybe you can find it here

That did cross my mind, but I heard quite a few times about these mobos going havoc on a BIOS update attempt, so I don't want to risk that unless there is no other way.

Will check it out, however I doubt that's the cause.

Good joke. No Turbo function present.

Tried to locate them. PcChips offer scandalizingly poor driver support for their older products. No drivers for the mobo itself were present on the driver CD either, so I'm stuck with the default Windows stuff here. At least unless someone here has a copy of proper ones.

What are the specs?
RAM?
Hardrive? (7.2 or 5.4 krpm?) Size?
Windows; what type? Win98 SE?
Any IRQ-conflict with HD-controller? <-- MAJOR FUBAR-risk

Had IRQ-conflict between my Ethernet-card and my Onboard Controller, and MAN.. that slowed the entire system down to almost nothing. Pretty simmulare to what you describe.

Soundcard?
Mouse? USB or PS2?

General staus or IRQ-adresses, any avalible or are many units sharing?

How many drives? 1 HDD and 1 CD?
Are they Master/Slave or Master on seperatly channels?

EDIT: After reading what you wrote again, it sounds to me that IRQ-conflicts (not obvious once) could verry well be the problem here.

What are the specs?
Celeron 400 running on a motherboard with 66 Mhz FSB and 6x multiplier, onboard lan, SPU, GPU(this one is BIOS-disabled)

RAM?
96 MB in 3x32 MB DIMM's

Hardrive? (7.2 or 5.4 krpm?) Size?
Don't know what RPM it has, not listed on the label.
Seagate U4 ST34311A, approx. 4 GB split into 1,5 and 2,5 GB FAT-32 partitions, no compression/encryption.

Windows; what type? Win98 SE?
W98SE, indeed.

Any IRQ-conflict with HD-controller? <-- MAJOR FUBAR-risk
Windows reports none.

Had IRQ-conflict between my Ethernet-card and my Onboard Controller, and MAN.. that slowed the entire system down to almost nothing. Pretty simmulare to what you describe.

Soundcard?
Onboard, 4 channel. Drivers are the most up-to-date ones straight from C-Media website.

Mouse? USB or PS2?
Neither. COM.

General staus or IRQ-adresses, any avalible or are many units sharing?

00 - System Clock
01 - free?
02 - Programmable Interrupt Controller
03 - Davicom 9102/A PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (onboard)
04 - COM 1
05 - free?
06 - Floppy controller
07 - Printer port (LPT 1)
08 - Realtime CMOS clock
09 - free?
10 - CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio device (onboard)
11 - free?
12 - ATI Rage XL on the only PCI slot
13 - Numeric Processor
14 - SiS 5513 Dual PCI IDE controller & Primary IDE controller (single fifo queque)
15 - Secondary IDE controller (single fifo queque)

How many drives? 1 HDD and 1 CD? Are they Master/Slave or Master on seperatly channels?
Right now 1 HDD & 1CD. Master/Slave on same channel.
A second HDD will be attached as a master on the second IDE channel as soon as I get the machine all right.

As a side note, some slowdowns also occur when anything has to do something with the onboard LAN card. Checking the settings under System Properties, loading drivers etc.

Here are some of the settings I have in the BIOS, maybe one of them might be the reason of the trouble:

For the hard drive, LBA, block transfer and 32-bit transfer are on, and PIO is set on mode 4 (this was all auto-detected by BIOS).
S.M.A.R.T is disabled (HDD supports it, tho)
SDRAM speed: 12 ns
Refresh queque depth: 4
SDRAM CAS latency: 3T
Allocate IRQ to PCI VGA: No (maybe I should set it to Yes?)
Reserve IRQ / DMA for ISA: No
Onboard parallel port: Auto, IRQ and DMA also Auto
Ultra DMA support: Enabled

Speed of computer does not only depends on processor, but also on memory, harddisk, etc.

Celleron is bad processor IMHO. It's simillar to Pentium 2, (400MHz) but with less memory on the processor it self.

You should not play with BIOS if you are not sure what you are doing. Just as someone already suggested: Restore Default Settings. ;)

Download Everest on that computer and check it with it, and post results here.

I am. Well, most of the time at least.

Will do at the next possibility, which means tomorrow - right now I have to return home.

just incase, try some virus etc. checks. You never know...