stuttering system, notice when playing music

Seanie M

Ok, I'll basically outline what my system is first:

Hardware:
P4 2.8GHz with HT Tech
2GB PC 2700D DDR RAM (333MHz - but not running at this for some reason)
2 X 40GB EIDE HDD's on a RAID 0 giving 1 80GB drive.
1 X 160GB EIDE HDD on an expansion bay as a removable drive
Abit IC7-G Motherboard with 800MHz FSB
Asus V9520/TD 128MB Video Card
Creative Audigy 2 Platinum
2 X DVD-RW Drives

Running:
Windows 2000 Professional
Norton 2004
AVG

amongst lots of other programmes.

The Problem:
on-going, at various times i.e. not cyclic, my computer stutters. Its strange. It is more noticed on playing music, either in Winamp, Media Player 10, or Roxio ECDC Audiocentral. I get a skip, or a blip. Sometimes 1, sometimes 3 or 4 in rapid succession. I could play the music from the hard drives or from a cd.

This was happening on the original 1GB of RAM, so I bought more in case not enough RAM was the problem, but it has had no effect whatsoever.

But, when I record music cd's, they come out fine, if that has any bearing on it.

The same hardware was running W98 for almost a year up until 3 months ago.

By the way, I reinstalled W2K 4 times because of this, and it happens each time.

As far as I could, I have downloaded all the motherboard etc updates.

Ask if you need more info.

Seanie

^whitey^

I had the same prob reinstalled the sound card and it did the trick

Seanie M

^whitey^ wrote:

I had the same prob reinstalled the sound card and it did the trick

Was it a Creative card?

And I have done that too... no joy.

Seanie M

I got it to work.

Funny enough, the removal of all the Audigy software, restarting, and letting the Find New Hardware Wizard find the drivers only for the soundcard has done the trick!

Means I have to sacrafice the Creative software of the soundcard, but not the applications like Wavelab and Cubasis.

Thanks,

Seanie.

Seanie M

Ok, I am not going to open a new thread, just keep this one going... though its going to be a bit long... Read on...

I removed the Creative programmes relating to the problem as shown above etc etc... got rid of most of the stuttering, but its still going on.

How can this be? Its reminiscent of when I had my P3 450MHz with 256 RAM, and when I pushed it to the limit, it stuttered on me! Now, on this pc, I have 2 GB of RAM, and not even close to being under pressure at all, it still stutters.

Example: I have minimum programmes loaded on startup, and all the nuisance things like Roxio drag-to-disc, Quicktime, etc etc are deactivated for startup. My system is practically doing nothing (though of course, Task Manager says otherwise, but they are all more or less critical programmes running - including 3 svchosts). I play a music file in Winamp, and thats when I really notice the stuttering. The Winamp graphic equaliser moving thingy (green-to-red dancing bars) would normally be slow, and then, after a few stutters, gets back up to normal speed.
Also, when playing Pinball, you hear it in the sound effetcs more than the motion of the ball/game.

Its like there are random electrial pulses going through the speakers, but you see it in the perfoamnce of the pc too.

Has anyone else experienced this before? With the same hardware (labelled in first post above), I had W98 for a year, and it never did this on me, so it must be something relating to drivers/W2K/processes.

I have used Spybot, Spy Cleaner, Crap Cleaner, AVG, Norton 2004, Defrag this and that... nothing has any effect. It hasn't gotten any worse with the introduction of these extra tools either - but I have uninstalled them when finished with anyway (apart fron AVG & Norton).

I am at my wits end, pulling my hair out, getting annoyed with interrupted music playing, and going square-eyed going over other forums in the net looking for solutions!

I have (I think) all the hotfixes, W2K service packs, updates etc etc.

Anyone?


Seanie.

Third_Echelon

Do you have Norton AV running all the time?

Its quite expensive on system resources. Stop or disable it for a while to see if that helps...

If not call the ghostbusters... sounds like your pc is haunted

Seanie M

Third_Echelon wrote:

Do you have Norton AV running all the time?

Its quite expensive on system resources. Stop or disable it for a while to see if that helps...

If not call the ghostbusters... sounds like your pc is haunted

No joy... I Disabled Auto Protect, but it still does it, albeit that tiny bit less...

Have you got the number for who I'm gonna call??



Seanie.

Third_Echelon

not on me, no.... i'm sure they are in the phonebook though!!!

Im all out of ideas. Sounds like you've covered all angles in your analysis

aidan_walsh

What version of DirectX are you using? I know for one that Winamp uses DirectSound for playing files, and I'm pretty sure MP10 plugs into it as well... Have you tried updating\reinstalling that?

Seanie M

doodle_sketch wrote:

What version of DirectX are you using?

I think I have 10 installed... where can I find out for sure?

moridin

start > run > dxdiag.

You tried putting the soundcard into a different PCI slot?

Seanie M

Thanks Moridin, it says Verison 9...

Thats practically the latest one right? I heard 10 was scrapped because of conflicts, so its not available yet.

I did try a different PCI slot, made no difference.

Seanie.

Seanie M

Just to add another point: when I am recording in via the soundcard (using the Aux In 2 on the front Audigy panel), I have never had any glitches on the sound quality there - and that could have been almost an hours recording too.

Seanie.

radiospan

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and check what the CPU usage is like when these blips happen.

Try to see if one program is hogging all the CPU at one time.

Seanie M

Its very modest plazz... Memory History Usage rmain constant - the yellow progress line is about 5%. The (dual) CPU Usage History spikes do peak now and again, but the peaks don't seem to go above 40% average. In the processes list, Firefox uses the most at almost 30MB, followed by ccapp (Norton), then one of the svchosts, both at 10MB...

One of the svchosts has jut terminated with what looked like a hex address in the small popup! Now I probably can't copy and paste again!

That means I have to reboot...



Seanie.

Seanie M

Third_Echelon wrote:

Do you have Norton AV running all the time?

Its quite expensive on system resources. Stop or disable it for a while to see if that helps...

While it does seem to help just a little, why would my system be affected on a 2GB RAM system?? According to Task Manager, ccapp is only using about 6MB...


Seanie.

ressem

Memory's only one of the resources that can result in memory slowdowns,
See task manager, Processes tab.
Select view, select column and you'll see stuff like the number of threads and handles vying for the attention of your cpu and hard drive.
which is how norton etc slow down your PC.

Have you investigated the Hard drive setup? by checking that there's no dodgy sectors on the disks (can be checked by a read only test using bootable floppy software downloaded from manufacturer)?
Would involve disconnecting from the hardware raid array, so not to be done lightly. How old are those 40GB disks?

During your reinstalls, did you see whether the problem occurs when you avoid the Raid and trying running Win just from your removable drive?

Given that you've reinstalled so often, I'd guess that the file table isn't too fragmented.

Seanie M

Thanks ressem,
the 2 X 40gigs are just over a year old. I'd say you're right about the lack of defragmentation - I look after my system regarding defragging about once every 2 weeks, and do a thourough virus scan every week.

By the way folks, I also notice it with the mouse movement. I would just wave the mouse around fast enough that when the stutter occurs, I notice it skipping a few inches on the screen between 2 points.

Seanie.