Cloned Win7 System to new drive, now really slow

[SoCalChris]

I have Windows 7 installed on my laptop. Original drive was a 5400RPM WD 320GB drive. I replaced it with a 5400 RPM WD Blue drive, 3MB/s SATA with 8MB cache. I'm not sure of the original drive's specifications, but it wasn't a high performance drive, it came in a discount laptop and I seriously doubt that any of its specs exceed the new drive's.

Since replacing the drive, the system is SLOW. If multiple programs try to access the drive at the same time, one will freeze until the other is finished. Often times the system will grind to a halt while this happens. Watching video will often freeze and stutter. These never happened previously. The system runs fine, except when the drive is being accessed, particularly when multiple programs are accessing the drive.

These are the things that I've tried...
1. Verified that drive is in DMA mode
2. Defragged the drive
3. Ran scandisk on the drive, no errors found
4. Ran WD Data Lifeguard Tools SMART quick test, no problems found

The system is an HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit running on an AMD Turion 64 X2, with 4GB of RAM.

The system was cloned with the free edition of Miray Software's HDClone (http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html)

Is there a setting that I need to reset in Windows to fix this? Should I backup my data and do a fresh install? I don't particularly want to have to reinstall everything, but I will if I need to. The speed is driving me nuts.

Thanks!

 

[ortoklaz]

Try Casper6.0(it's not free though)

 

[panto]

Just taking a stab at it, could it be configuration settings or drivers relating to the old disk that doesn't work well with the new? You may want to dig deeper and check out access and service times for the disk (pretty sure win 7 has this level of monitoring built in somewhere) to see whether it's the disk that is misbehaving or the OS.

If you're changing disk it's a good opportunity to do a fresh windows install anyway - I personally feel uneasy about OS image clones onto different hardware.

 

[SoCalChris]

I wound up going in to the device manager, and deleting the drive, and allowing Windows to automatically reinstall the driver. This caused windows to display the "This copy of Windows is not Genuine" message (It is), at which point I wiped the drive and started fresh. Thanks for the ideas.

 

[SoCalChris]

Best answer selected by SoCalChris.