Help, Techies!: Diagnose Odd Computer Stuttering
Oct 5, 2006 at 8:20 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 10

ilovesocks

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First of all, here are my system specs:

Antec Aria case/PSU (300W, 18A on the 12v rail)
MSI socket478 micro-ATX motherboard
Pentium 4 Prescott 3GHz (not overclocked)
2gb (4 x 512mb) Mushkin DDR400
nVIDIA 6800 vanilla (AGP, overclocked)
2 hard drives (74gb WD Raptor, 500gb WD Caviar SE16), 1 optical
Windows XP Pro w/ SP2

Details and pics, if you really want them:
http://www.tech-forums.net/showthrea...threadid=79332

Okay, so what happens is that every once in a while, regardless of whether I'm doing heavy gaming, listening to music, watching videos, surfing the web, or word processing, is that the computer will begin to stutter for a small fraction of a second every second. It doesn't seem to affect any processes or corrupt any data--in fact, if I'm watching a movie when it happens, the audio stutters for a few seconds, then it smooths out. But the stuttering is very apparent when listening to music (ASIO4ALL), and in the choppy movement of the mouse cursor. Also, any input that I give during the stuttering (i.e. mouse clicks, typing) isn't recognized. On the other hand, processes like copying files work just fine, as if the computer just picks up from where it was after every stutter. The choppiness of the cursor annoys the fizzle out of me, and gaming during stutter sessions is impossible. The only way I've found to fix the stuttering is to shut the computer down completely for a second and then boot it back up. A simple reboot doesn't work.

Some days I get no stuttering at all and other days it'll happen several times in an hour, and it happens indiscriminately of whether the CPU is under heavy load and operating at ~40C or is idling at ~28-30C, so I don't think overheating is a possibility. One suspect that I don't want to admit is the possibility of inadequate power from the PSU. I really don't think that this is the problem either, though, because 300W and 18A on the 12v rail should be suffient for this low amount of hardware. I've used a few PSU wattage calculators on the web and they all prescribe ~300W peak wattage, and remember that the stuttering can happen when I'm hardly doing anything at all. I suppose what I should do is connect a beefier PSU and see if I ever get any stuttering.

Anyway, has anyone ever seen a problem like this?
 
Oct 5, 2006 at 8:45 PM Post #2 of 10
What Make/Model is the motherboard?

What versions of drivers are you running for your video card, motherboard/onboard sound? What BIOS version are you using on your motherboard?

Do you know the latency specs of your memory? 3-3-6, 2-2-6, etc.

How long have you had the Aria?
 
Oct 5, 2006 at 9:46 PM Post #3 of 10
its probibly not a power suppply problem, usually if a powersuply is weak you will get random blue screens of death or reboots

press ctl-alt-delete to open the task manager, highlight the Performance tab and check to see if the CPU is being used while the stuttering is occuring.

first thing you should try is to turn off system restore, it may be in use when it thinks you are idle, but you are actually doing somthing like listening to music or watching a movie. right click My Computer, select Properties, highlight the System restore tab, turn it off for all drives.

reboot, that may fix the problem.

once you see if that worked, since you have two hard drives, you should also move the pagefile off the drive that has the OS, right click My Comptuter, select Properties, access the Advanced Tab, under Performance heading click Settings, when the Perfomance Options window opens access the Advanced tab, make sure the Processor Scheduling and Memory usage headers both have "Programs" selected, then under the Virtual Memory heading select Change, highlight the C drive(or whichever is Raptor [OS drive?]) , select "No Paging File", then highlight the D drive(or whichever is Caviar[backup drive?]), select "Custom Size" and set both the initial and maximum to 2048 mb.

also if youre Caviar drive is not SATA double check that its jumper set to the slave position, if your drives are both SATA then you dont need to set jumpers.

if these suggestion dont work then try removing 3 of your Ram Sticks and just run one in the primary slot, some motherboards have trouble with 4 sticks (or one may he gone bad, so if running one fixes the problem then try all 4 seperately as singles and see which one is broke)
 
Oct 5, 2006 at 10:34 PM Post #4 of 10
I actually had a problem like this recently where whenever the DVD drive spun, the mouse cursor and any audio/video that was playing would stutter. No data corruption, as the timing of the stuttering wasn't reproducible within an audio/video file. I updated the DVD drivers, and everything was fixed. I have no idea if this is relevant to your problem at all, but maybe you could try updating your hardware drivers.
 
Oct 5, 2006 at 11:10 PM Post #5 of 10
Here's a nice registry tweak that helps performance.

Open registry editor (start > run > regedit)
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\

Change the value of DisablePagingExecutive from 0 to 1
 
Oct 5, 2006 at 11:16 PM Post #6 of 10
Okay, I'll give more information first.

mobo: MSI 865GM2-LS
Award BIOS TypePhoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG. Incidentally, I've updated the BIOS before, and the newest version is still from 9/04.
I've had this system for a little over a year.
Onboard audio is disabled in the BIOS (I use a USB DAC).
Video driver version: 91.33 (the stuttering came way before this version was released)
RAM timings: 2-2-2-6 (Mushkin XP3200 is actually rated at 2-2-2-5, I think. I raised the last one because I was told that it doesn't affect bandwidth, so the only thing it does is raise the possibility of less stability)

Second, thanks for all the suggestions, euclid, but unfortunately, I had already disabled System Restore, and had moved the paging file to the Caviar (which is SATA--and yes, the Raptor is the OS drive). Out of curiosity, why 2gb? Right now I've got the size set at 1gb (min and max). All four RAM sticks passed several days' worth of memtest86, and the stuttering started before I got the second two, anyway. The one thing I haven't done is look at CPU usage during stuttering. I'll definitely do that next time it starts.

Finally, as far as I can tell, my DVD drivers are up-to-date, and the stuttering definitely occurs at times when the DVD drive is empty or not busy.

Thanks again!

EDIT: Thanks for the reg tweak, floyden. We'll see if that fixes it!
 
Oct 5, 2006 at 11:59 PM Post #8 of 10
Quote:

Originally Posted by c0mfortably_numb
Try to disable Indexing Service.


Done! Thanks.
biggrin.gif
Chipset drivers are up-to-date, according to MSI's auto-updating program.
 
Oct 6, 2006 at 12:03 AM Post #9 of 10
Quote:

Originally Posted by ilovesocks
Okay, I'll give more information first.

mobo: MSI 865GM2-LS
Award BIOS TypePhoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG. Incidentally, I've updated the BIOS before, and the newest version is still from 9/04.
I've had this system for a little over a year.
Onboard audio is disabled in the BIOS (I use a USB DAC).
Video driver version: 91.33 (the stuttering came way before this version was released)
RAM timings: 2-2-2-6 (Mushkin XP3200 is actually rated at 2-2-2-5, I think. I raised the last one because I was told that it doesn't affect bandwidth, so the only thing it does is raise the possibility of less stability)

Second, thanks for all the suggestions, euclid, but unfortunately, I had already disabled System Restore, and had moved the paging file to the Caviar (which is SATA--and yes, the Raptor is the OS drive). Out of curiosity, why 2gb? Right now I've got the size set at 1gb (min and max). All four RAM sticks passed several days' worth of memtest86, and the stuttering started before I got the second two, anyway. The one thing I haven't done is look at CPU usage during stuttering. I'll definitely do that next time it starts.

Finally, as far as I can tell, my DVD drivers are up-to-date, and the stuttering definitely occurs at times when the DVD drive is empty or not busy.

Thanks again!

EDIT: Thanks for the reg tweak, floyden. We'll see if that fixes it!



hmm that is a weird problem, maybe you should rollback your vid card to stock speeds to see if that does anything.
confused.gif


the reason i recommended 2gb is just to give the page file enough breathing room that it wont competely fill. open task manager after youve been running the computer for awhile doing normal daily usage stuff, look at the Peak Commit Charge and that will give you a guideline to go by. i have 2gb of system ram also my peak usuage doesnt go much higher than 500mb and for normal internet surfing ive only peaked at 160mb this session, w/ 2gb physical i dont think we need to worry about the PF usage so much but you never know, maybe yours is peaking at 1g for some reason. try switching to "system managed" temporarily, are you sure the computer is recognizing all 4 sticks?

also in Task Manager look at all the processes and check each in Google to make sure they are all relevant.
 
Oct 14, 2006 at 8:46 PM Post #10 of 10
Well, it's been a week now, and no more stuttering!
blink.gif


So, it was either caused by the Indexing Service (fixed by disabling it in the drive properties) or by the Paging Executive for which floydenheimer posted the registry tweak. Either way, thank you so much, everyone!
 

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