BIZARRE problem...

Lex_Diamonds

OK, I hope someone can help me with this.

I recently got a new gfx card, wasnt that happy with the performance so I flashed the bios of my mobo.

This lead to a niggly problem with the card not being recognised and also HDD performance loss.

So I formatted/restored old bios etc and now there is a problem which wont go away, even when I put in my old gfx card.

What happens is, my computer stutters intermittently. In both games and on the desktop. There is no hard drive activity at all, just this horrible little stutter evey couple of seconds.

Just scroll up and down a page and you can notice it.

What the hell is it? Im thinking something got fried along the way, but what? I dont want to replace my mobo to find its the ram etc.

Your comments would be greatly appreciated!

PIII 1ghz
i815mobo
256ram 133, cas2
Windows 2000

SantaHoe

Hmm, going on your "HDD performance loss" statement, it might be worth checking wether your harddrive is being accessed PIO mode or UDMA mode... the former mode makes heavy use of the CPU which I find stutters things quite a bit, this would also be in keeping with a loss in HD performance.*
There again, you did say there was no HD access during the stutters... but I'd check it out anyway... should only take a few seconds to find out.

What you could try, is borrowing a harddrive with Win98 on it... and possibly rule out a software/driver problem on your machine.

With problems like what you're describing, the cause could be any number of things ... so I guess all you can do is rule out every possibility... take out X peice of hardware, replace it with something else, and see if it makes any difference... you'll track it down eventually.

*(open the "Primary IDE Channel" device in device manager, then go to "Advanced settings", and it should tell you there)

zAbbo

Did you remove the drivers of the old card

you may have flashed with an incorrect or beta BIOS, trying flashing the bios again but with an older BIOS. There really are som many solutions,

Does your mobo have onboard GFX, disable it

Reinstall Drivers for Card + Direct X

Like SantaHoe said its a matter of eliminating one by one

I don`t think you should have flashed the bios tho

Lex_Diamonds

Well, well, well, I dont know if this is pertinant information but I decided to have a look at task manager and the CPU usage monitor therein.

My CPU usage when idle is twice as much as it was before the problems and it jumps up a percentage every couple of seconds, timing perfectly with these "stutters" I was telling you about.

Ideas?

SantaHoe

Still could be PIO mode at work, did you check that out yet?
Other than that, it could be some dodgy service running in the background... like the indexing service or some such poo.
I'd install win98 just to see if it's a software or hardware issue... either that, or you could go through your list of 'local services' and 'stop' them one by one, until the problem stops. (if it does)

Lex_Diamonds

udma 100 is in full swing so it aint that, ill try the services yoke.


*UPDATE*

Well, I went into services, disabled the unecessary things and it fixed the problem! CPU usage went down to nothing and the jerkiness went.

However, the feckin thing came back when I rebooted, and i've run out of services to disable

This is a right prick of a problem...

KdjaCL

Whats is your AGP muliplier set at and AGP aperture in Bios.
I know of a simliar prob if you AGP card is 4x and is set at 4x drop it to 2x and make sure your aperture is set correctly to whatever your card is.
Hope that helps.
Kdja

sutty

it sounds like when you usdated your BIOS, you set some of the settings back to default, you should have a look at Ram settings, PCI bus settings and profrmance settings

Lex_Diamonds

*plink*

Heralds the coming together of champagne glasses and the end of my problems.

Turns out it was my zip drive, which now decides to make my resources go mental when connected to my printer port.

Ive disconnected the foul thing but I wonder if I can solve the problem for good?

JustHalf

What mode is your Parallel port running on? Standard? ECP? EPP?

It (should be) in your BIOS.

flamegrill

Parallel port should be set to ECP for use with a zip drive. install the proper drivers for the zip drive and then run the accelleration tool that comes with the software.