I dug this fossil out, as a laptop got stolen, and I needed a PC any PC.
It ran very slow for a Core 2 2666 with DDR2-800 RAM. I had a look at BIOS settings,
after trying a few things, I changed the SATA0-3 setting to Native. That sped it up
at least triple! Not only disk access, but even drawing graphics on the screen
revved up. So what happens if it is not "Native"? Does it fall back to the lowest
level of PIO imitating a 1980's IDE disk?
Now I have another brand of mainboard also with the ICH8 chipset, and that
does not show this huge speed effect.
So has this model got a stuffed-up BIOS, or maybe it has a bad chip creating
an interrupt flood when this SATA setting is flipped?
