external HDD slow

[Vukasin]

My External HDD is working very slow on Windows 7. Its not hardware failure or something, because he served me well for 1year+. But since i installed W7 it works very slow, while working it sounds like helicopter is inside. And it flashes red, it didnt copy faster then 100kb/s . But i did some things and now it works 5mb/s. But it used to work WAAAAY faster before.... Do you know what the problem is? Can i fix it?

[Ragdoll]

Lucky it even works... mine used to work, but after I installed W7... it doesn't even connect.

[Julio.]

Copy all the data onto another Hard Drive, preferably a Solid State Hard Drive, in case you do not know what it is, a normal Hard Drive has moving parts, a Solid State is essentially a bigger Memory Stick.

It will last longer and is less likely to be corrupted

I say this because IF the Hard Drive is dying, you do not want to lose the data

[JDC]

Windows 7 chomps on a lot of RAM compared to XP. Is your hardware designed so it can take it?

[Julio.]

I thought even though it is a bigger OS, Windows 7 was faster than XP and Vista

[JDC]

Any software that is designed to run faster although requiring more memory to do so, will not run efficiently on weaker hardware than what it was recommended for. Win7 is one such example of the said kind of software.

[Julio.]

I know Windows Vista 32 bit could only recognise 3.3GB of RAM, how much can Windows 7 Recognise?

[JDC]

I personally have no idea of any of the specific values behind the Windows OSs, try looking it up at Wiki.
 
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows 7