[The Fifth Horseman]

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