slow computer with new HD

I bought new HD - maxtor 250GB and since then my computer is very slow. I cannot watch movies or listen music, b/c of that. Restart computer doesnt help. But sometimes it's working good (like right now). I have 2 partitions - 137GB and 113GB. I am thinking that maybe some cooler for hard disk may help, but I'm not sure. Any ideas?
Thank you.

What is the rest of your setup? What power supply? Does windows have anything to say about the drive functioning correctly?

I have win XP servise pack1, GForceFX5600, MB Asus A7A266
power supply is 250W, 512MB RAM, cpu 1,33GB. Windows doesn't say anything about the drive functioning incorrectly.
Everything works fine, but really slow (not all the time, sometime it's ok)

Are you sharing the ide channel between the hdd and another device? If so, were you before? Is this a 5400 rpm drive? What speed was the drive you replaced? Can you try a bigger power supply? Is there any pattern to when the performance is good compared to when it is bad?

Ide channel... you mean that cable? It is connected to CD-RW also. It is 5400 rpm. My old HDD was also connected with CD-RW, it was 7200 rpm and it worked with no problem. I would have to buy new power supply to try it. Right now it is running good, I really don't know why. But sometime when I watch movie or listen music, it slows down. I aslo have a bluetooth, if it helps.
Thank you

Try getting another ide cable and connecting the cdrw to the board separately, if you have an open slot. Also, your old hdd was faster, so it wouldn't take as long to find things. The current one would be expectedly slower. The lag with movies and music almost sounds llike you could use more ram too, but I think that the slower rpm is a big part of your problem, though if you could borrow a bigger psu to try it out, that would be interesting.

Ok I'll try it, thank you.

You're on the right track about connecting the CD-RW drive seperately.

There's always a slow down when two IDE devices share the same channel - that's the major disadvantage with IDE. However, this is generally less noticable with two IDE HDD's, or two IDE optical drives.

I have a feeling if he connected the CD-RW drive to a seperate controller, 90% of the slowness will disappear.

That would be my definite opinion, except that his old, fast hdd was also sharing the channel, so the slowness seems like its partially related to the slower spinning, does it not?

Oh, sure, that's going to cause part of the issue as well.

But it can be improved upon by moving the CD-RW to a seperate channel - you can't increase the speed of the HDD without replacing it, but you can reduce the load on the IDE controller by changing the drive layout.

I did connect CD-RW drive and HDD seperately, but it didnt help. I did not try new power supply. For exemple if I watch movie, about 10 min. is ok and then it slows down for few minutes, the HDD led (red) light up, but then it's ok for few minutes again. Today I noticed that when it slows down and I open "windows task manager" (ctrl-alt-del) in performance, it shows CPU usage 100%. Check attachment picture pls. When I turn movie off it goes down to normal (about 8%).
I really don't know what to do.
Thank you.

Well, for whatever reason, your DVD software is caching to the harddrive - that's when you notice the Activity light on the HDD. This is going to be where the RPM's would really be noticable - a slower drive is going to provide information slower in the Seek phase of a read operation because it's spinning slower.

Depending on the DVD software, you might try uninstalling and reinstalling the software - this might reset the configuration and make it work better with the slower drive.

Otherwise - I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do, off the top of my head....

I don't have any DVD software, I meant movie files - avi. And it doesnt happen only when I watch movies, it happens even when I turn on the internet explorer or when I'm listening music, in winamp.

Nobody can help?

My guess is that its just because you now have a slower hdd than you did before. Slower spinning=longer seek times, so when you are doing something like watching a movie or listening to lots of music that is using the hdd a lot, you get those slowdowns. You could try defragmenting I suppose, and always being sure to close background applications when you are watching a movie, and a bigger power supply if you get a chance. The same thing happens on my laptop though, which also has a slow spinning drive, so you might just have to live with it. You could put your old hdd (the 7200rpm one) back in as well, and using it for programs, with the big, slow 250gb drive as storage. Might help.