Gx270 Revisited
It has been interesting working on the Gx270. In a previous post I noted that the computer was running a bit slow so I ran a series of diagnostics and when I was though the machine ran so slow that it took 20-30 minutes to boot. I spent several 10s of hours trying to figure out what I did. I ran into brick walls at every turn. Google was not my friend. It didn’t take me to anything that was helpful.
I started looking for a new motherboard to replace what I had. I noticed that in one ad for a used motherboard, that the copy said that it had adjustable speed using the “compatibility mode.” Researching compatibility mode, I found that it was a checkoff in the BIOS. Looking at my BIOS I saw that Compatibility was enabled. I turned it off and rebooted and the machine came back to life at the original speed. I was Back in business.
The improvement brought me back to the same point that I had been in several weeks before — the beast was slower and I was using nearly 100% realtime when I used HRD v5. Beta. Now the 5 Beta is not supposed to load the machine badly so I knew that something else was the cause.
I run an external USB soundcard, just because I had a 24 bit external left over from the days when I was running a HP laptop that couldn’t seem to run the PSK software I was using when linked to the internal soundcard. Working may way trough the various options for the soundcard I found that the “monitor” check off was enabled. Unchecking that bit decreased the realtime usage down to a reasonable level <6% before starting HRD.
However when I start HRD, realtime goes to nearly 50%…so something else is in play. I noticed that HRD itself was only using about 10% realtime but my system had jumped considerably. I am still working on that issue and will document it as soon as I figure it out.