RATZA FRATZIN 'PUTER....

[filkertom]

I don't know if it's the minimal software I've added on, or the XP SP3 which certainly seemed to work before the damn CPU/mobo went belly-up or if I've got the wrong connections on the drives or if USB 2.0 isn't as fast for me or what, but ever since I had to do that full re-install last month, I've had nearly constant system stuttering. As in, every few seconds, the thing will just stop for a moment. Or audio or video will stall.

Doesn't matter what program, doesn't matter how big or small.

Something seems to be constantly polling the drives, but I can't narrow it down.

Needless to say, this is an extreme ass-pain for playing games or listening to music. But when you're trying to create music, it's a deal-breaker.

I ended up getting a new sound card, because the new mobo's onboard sound is crap and Creative's alleged driver update system doesn't effing work and the system keeps saying my X-Fi Xtreme Gamer "cannot start (code 10)". This is, apparently, a fairly common problem, which I'd never heard of because the damn thing worked fine on my previous install.

The biggest difference is that the last computer was an Intel Core 2 Duo, and this is an AMD Phenom II X2 555 (Black Edition). I've never had problems with AMD before, and if I had the money I would go over to Micro Center and get an Intel CPU/mobo and an OEM copy of Windows 7 and just say fuggit.

I have tried real-time monitors. I have tried overclocking. I have tried BIOS settings. I have tried AMD-specific dual-core optimizers. I have tried Raoul Mitgong, but he didn't help much. I have tried defragging, process hunting, service shutdowns, virtual memory rearrangement, and swapping the slots of actual memory chips.

At some point in the next three weeks, I'm likely to redo the whole damn thing again. Not looking forward to it, but there it is. Any other suggestions? Suggesting switching to Mac or Linux will be met with wads of wet toilet paper.

Comments

[solarbird]

Run a repair install from the XP installation disc. This smells like maybe a motherboard-level driver issue, probably something to do with the PCI bus controller, and if you can have it detect your hardware again from the ground up that'd likely solve it. If that's what it is, which, I admit, is a big if.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Love to, can't. I actually gave that disk away a few years ago, having made a slipstream disk from it. It doesn't have the Repair Installation option. Dang it.

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Possibly you could get the disk back? Maybe some one out there might have the same disk (how do you identify which build of Windows XP, from the info?) Someone might be able to help here.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

Any WinXP disc should work if Tom still has a copy of his I-Am-Not-A-Crook authentication code.

[kengr]

Actually, he needs to right variety of XP.

There are two seperate categories, each with two options:

XP Home vs XP Pro

OEM vs retail.

A code for XP Home retail won't work for OEM or for either version of Pro. And the same goes for the other three possibilities.

I have all 4 versions and can either arrange to get an ISO file to Tom or get a physical CD to him if he can't burn a CD.

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

There's an application out there called keyfinder.exe that will reconstruct your activation code and tell you what version of Windows it's geared toward. I don't know how they do it, but it's always worked for me (at least until I installed Windows 7 for amd64).

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've got my activation code. And I've got XP Home. It was a legally obtained OEM version, and there was a point when Microsoft announced they weren't going to care how many machines activated with the same code. I sold an older machine to one guy after making the slipstream (and I think that's where the disk is), and made a copy of the slipstream for someone else, and that's it.

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Heh True story: Back in the days when I was doing Windows 95 tech support I once got to help Donny Osmond with a similar problem. He'd had to reinstall one of his machines and couldn't find his activation code. We had a pleasant chat about his work while I was looking up the answer (he was touring with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the time).

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

I just had to talk my mother-in-law through that. I think we finally got through to my father-in-law that just turning off the power instead of going through the proper shutdown is a Bad Idea.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Have I mentioned I miss my Amiga? I miss my Amiga.

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

I have no suggestions, but I will offer my sympathy.

It's rough when your computer hates you and doesn't want to cooperate. :-(

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I appreciate it, sweetie. [hugs]

[jcbemis.livejournal.com]

i just sent my netbook to geek squad - it's not been right since it found and isolated a virus attached to my wireless mouse driver - now they say it's a hardware problem that just happened to occur at the same time and they're sending it off to get repaired under warranty

[djonn]

Hmmm.

If it's a software problem, it has the smell of "the OS is looking for something that isn't there", which leads in the general direction solarbird has already gone.

If it's a board/component-type hardware problem, all that noodling you describe ought to have solved it by now.

I'd say the next thing to rule out is the machine's power supply. The described symptoms are odd as power-supply problems go (in my experience, usually when the power supply dies it just, well, dies), but not completely implausible.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm truly thinking and hoping it's software at this point. It may be a pain, but it probably isn't a spending spree with money I ain't got.

And, good to hear from you! It's been awhile.

SP 3 causes indigestion with your other non-MS software?

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

One of our lab's computers is a Dell running XP, that is mostly dedicated to running our Agilent HPLC's ChemStation software. A while ago, ( i.e., ever since SP3 downloaded itself,) the system was running funny, and mucking up our sample separation, detection, and purification. My coworker Justin was calling the HPLC his "crazy ex-girlfriend." (He got married this past year.)

Finally, we called Agilent and were told that ServicePack 3 was simply incompatible with the ChemStation. We had to backup all our results and method files, wipe the hard drive, re-install Windows XP, and SPs 1 & 2, and take steps to prevent updates. The HPLC runs fine now.

HPLC stands for High Pressure (or Performance) Liquid Chromatography. Typically costs as least as much as a Toyota.

Re: SP 3 causes indigestion with your other non-MS software?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Re: SP3 -- honestly, I dunno. Everything sure seemed to be running fine with XP SP3 before the hardware went gfubnr. On the other hand, I know that I originally installed the sound card before SP3, and I suspect that's why it worked back then. I've been thinking about that, as the slipstream disk is geared for SP2, and I patched it with SP3 after.

Re: HPLC -- hoooooooly mackul, Andy.

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Might try turning off the indexing service.

[mdlbear]

Another likely culprit is anti-virus software, which can be very intrusive.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Uninstalling Windows Search also would likely help.

Or at least disabling it which you can do in the services.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

No anti-virus. I'm just very, very careful. ;) MS Security Essentials is actually pretty robust. I will try disabling Indexing and Search (I use Everything anyway).

[invader-tak-1.livejournal.com]

Must not comment, must not comment, must not comment.......

[tarkrai.livejournal.com]

Since I am also allergic to wet toilet paper, I also shall refrain from comment.

OTOH, I can offer all the sympathy in the world. Tom, the problems you're seeing could happen on *any* platform- Mac, Linux, or Windows. Since I'm nowhere near an expert at your particular problem- I just wish you a lot of (inexpen$ive) luck.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Appreciate it, ace. And it was so great to see you and Katy at OVFF! Way too long.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's fine, dearheart. [hugs] I just have way too much both financially and emotionally invested in certain programs, and the more time I spend learning new stuff is less time doing new stuff.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling, Tom. On my Linux box, I have Wine installed so I can continue to run mirc and Forte Agent since those two are must-have apps for me. I found a winamp-clone for Linux so I have a mostly-familar music player as well (not quite winamp, but seams to be close enough for what I need to do there).

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Is your computer named Harlequin?

The only useful suggestion I have is to check to make sure your paging file is the right size. Too big or too little and Windows could stop dead while it swaps out memory to the hard drive.

Speaking of which, have you run a hard drive diagnostic? One other possibility I just thought of is, if the drive is going out it could be taking a moment to reset itself, which will stop just about everything IIRC.

I'd rule out the hardware as best I can before I reinstall, because if it is a hardware problem reinstalling the software probably won't do anything.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Hm. I've got 4 GB physical RAM (32-bit system recognizes 3.25 -- most likely because of the 512 MB RAM on the graphics card), and I set Drive C: to 8192 (actual 8176). The system recommends 4990. I'll try that and get right back to you.

ETA: Nope, not the paging file. I'm running chkdsk right now. Oh, and, yay on being the first to recognize that. ;)

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

The 32-bit OS will only recognize about 3.25GB of RAM - it's a limitation of 32 bits.

I would agree with solarbird - it's probably a motherboard driver issue (I would bet your slipstreamed copy of XP didn't have the right drivers for the new motherboard).

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Again, hm. I thought the 32-bit system would recognize a total of 4 GB RAM, including the board. I wonder if that's causing any of the problem.

The motherboard drivers came with the board. I've installed those twice now. The BIOS is supposedly up-to-date as well.

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

Ah - you're right. 4GB of RAM, including that reserved for the board and/or expansion cards. (Still only shows up as 3.something GB, depending on the board and the cards, which you already knew.)

I have had problems in the past with some pieces of software (most notably Adobe products) just not liking certain versions of AMD chips (due to the chip's internal instruction set), but I thought they fixed most of those problems. And your problem sounds more like something with the OS, since it seems to 'get busy' looking for something, causing the stutters.

About half my render farm (10 boxes or so) is dual processor AMDs (actually 2 physical chips - these boxes pre-date dual core CPUs) running XP Pro SP3, so your choice of AMD shouldn't be the problem.

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

If your PC has a built-in disk diagnostic,or one that came with the disk, I'd run that too. Something that will check the drive's SMART status. About a month ago my computer stopped booting into Windows, but the Linux side was fine, and rebuilding the MBR didn't help. I could still read the files from Linux, just for some reason Windows wouldn't boot. I ran the disk checker that HP built into the laptop's BIOS and it reported that my hard drive was failing.

Hopefully we can rule out enough stuff that someone can say "Well, if it isn't A or B or C it must be D."

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Second this recommendation. Some tool that will show the S.M.A.R.T. flags from the drive. Could be a failing disk.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Okay, I just installed the 30-day trial of Active Smart 2.8, which seems pretty comprehensive. It says everything's peachy-keen on all fronts. (The site also has a freeware Disk Scanner which I'm running right now, to make sure there are no physical errors.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The process analyzers I have now want me to kick in $30 to give me any information. Although Anvir Free does add some really cool stuff to the system (most notably, and used all the damn time: a history of folders you've recently loaded from/saved to, so you can get back and forth in Load/Save dialogues a lot faster. If there's a small open-source program that does just that, I'd love to hear about it).

[ttamsen.livejournal.com]

You can obtain Process Monitor and Process Explorer from Sysinternals (now Microsoft-owned) for free. All their utilities are top-notch and deeply technical. Process Explorer is a Task manager replacement which allows you to drill to stack-trace level in individual threads of specific processes attached to given windows, etc. It'll show you what files, handles, objects, ports, etc are in use by any given system component.

Process Monitor is kind of the same thing, except it collects the information and logs it. It is *very* useful for identifying the kind of periodic slowdown that you're experiencing. The only real caveat is that with its default capture settings, it logs an unholy pile of data. Which is what you want, since you don't know specifically what is causing the problem. As you start to get a sense of what it might be, though, you'll want to turn on filters saying either "just capture this" or "don't bother capturing that" to get a clearer look at the pertinent data.

It's at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx. Many of the other Sysinternals utilities are worth a look as well, just to keep in your toolbox.

I sure hope you track the culprit down and stomp on it!

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

A simple starting point is to bring up the Process list with cltrl alt del. Click on the CPU line and organize the list by most cpu time used. Then when the stutter takes place, see which program is the cause.

I have had this before, and it turned out to be a USB problem. Specifically I swapped two USB drives around. Now while this shouldn't cause a problem, one of the tricks Windows uses to boot faster is to cache the computer's organization setup. So swapping the drives made the computer get confused about the 512G drive in teh 256 spot and the 256 drive in the 512 spot. So every few seconds, the computer would hesitate as it tried to figure out the problem.

What I did for this was go into the System Device list and remove all the USB devices in the system. Then I rebooted. The computer then saw the USB devices and reinstalled them again in the correct as-it-is order. If you are using USB devices for your sound IO or midi interfaces and mixed them up, this could be the cause. (you don't wanna know what my recording/lab rig looks like -- remember the old Moog system 5? Think more wires and clutter than that... )