Be Excellent To Each Other

Anyway my computer behaves a bit strangely at times. When I load up Nero or itunes the computer grinds to a halt for a little while then gets going again. If there is a sound playing at the time then when it freezes it will repeat fractions of a second for a second. Y'know sort of
tttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmmmeeeeeess ssssssstttttttttrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeetttttttttcccccccccccchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It only seems to do it with these two programs though. Is it likely a hard disk is dying? Not enough power from the PSU?

Needs more RAM or a better video card.

I'm running on 2GB of ram at the minute on XP. Surely that's enough? My video card is a Geforce 8400 with 256MB ram.

I am running three hard drives on it, a blu ray drive and DVD drive. Quad core Intel chip too.

It has been known to blue screen if left to its own devices for a long time.

EDIT: Basically it's the machine you told me to build way back when. The first one of which died within a couple of months in a similar manner to how this is behaving.

I had this happen on one of my old PCs whenever I opened a program that had a big list of sortable data. I can't remember if I replaced the video card or downloaded a new driver or what I did.
2GB should be plenty of RAM, but it depends how much it needs. If you open a program while watching the performance tab under Task Manager, do you get a CPU or RAM spike?

OR it could be the CD drive waking up. Unplug the CD drive and see it that makes a difference.

It does it without anything in the drive as far as I can remember but I'll check. Considering the DVD drive hasn't been burning at proper speed lately it's possible.

You'll do better to open perfmon.msc and add a number of counters around disk IO, CPU, and swapfile use.

I second the Doc. I'm not usually an advocate of slavish defragging, but it may help you here.

Also,



No. We'd totally lose track of what problems people were responding to, which ones were sorted etc.

When I had BSOD crashing problems, it was due to a faulty stick of RAM. Annoyingly, it wouldn't do it all the time though - I spent ages pissing about swapping the sticks around/in different sockets/using one or t'other.

If you suspect faulty RAM issues, get memtest86 on a bootable USB drive and let it run for a few hours. If it finds problems, pull the RAM one stick at a time until you find the dodgy one.

This counter thing you mention, what is it and how do I do it?

Start | run | perfmon.msc

You'll get a realtime display of a few different performance metrics over the last 100 seconds. Like Task Manager, but more detailed.

Right click, Add counters will reveal a dizzying number of things you can track. In all likelihood, one or more of these things is going nuts when you computer goes mad. You just need to figure out which one.

Start by adding these:

When I loaded up perfmon.msc it did the timestretch thing for a couple of seconds and then told me "at least one data sample is taking longer than expected' or something like that. Hmm I've just had a thought (new experience for me). It seems likely that it has a problem with the DVD drives in some fashion. The programs which cause a problem try to access the drives. I'll disconnect them and see what happens.

Right I've rejigged the configuration of drives and it all seems fine now. Maybe it didn't like the Sata port one of the drives was in.

Hijack!

Why, exactly, does not installing any driver at all for my new video card mean that it works, and yet if I attempt to install any driver for it other than the OS defaults, even using the manufacturer's own files, it not only doesn't work, but crashes the PC and forces me to physically remove the card and all evidence of it to get it 'working' again?

It is very annoying.

It's here: http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce2mx.html (MX400) by the way. I just want any improvement over on-board graphics to be honest, so that literally every 3d programme doesn't crash the PC.

My 280 was doing that after it was fucked. Basically on a standard VGA driver or safe mode (without the driver loaded) it would boot into windows and work. However, as soon as you enabled the driver it went spazzy and took a shit.

So your card could well be buggered.

Have you tried flashing the bios?

Pervert.

Err...

I thought you were just on about it having a disc in and that spinning up. I've got it all connected again now anyway, just a different way around.

I think JC may be right

JohnCoffey, I mean, not Jesus Christ. Although he was probably right now and then as well.

Edit: Does anyone have a spare PCI video card they could sell me? I frankly don't much care about the specs, as I'm currently using an onboard thing so it pretty much couldn't possibly be worse. It needs to work with XP and a VIA chipset. I don't want to spend more than about a tenner if possible (plus postage, obv).