Ya know, I'm having the same type of problem. I a pair of Raptor 74gig
drives running Raid 0. The drives are absolutely fine, with no errors.
This mainly happens in World of Warcraft. During gameplay, all of a
sudden, everything will freeze, for about 5 seconds. I can't move the
mouse, nothing. After the five seconds, everything is just fine. When
the freeze is occuring, the hardrive light is pegged on, almost like
it is flushing it's cache or something along those lines.
I am using a USB flashdrive, as a ready drive. I'm wondering if this
has anything to do with it, because when the harddrive light is pegged
on, during the freeze, the flashdrive is also blinking(meaning it's
being accessed). I'm wondering if the flashdrive is dumping itse;f to
the harddrive or vice versa. I'm gonna take the flash drive out and
see if that changes anything.
BTW, there is no set interval this happens, it just does, on
occasion.
On Feb 20, 11:15 am, "Dale \"Mad_Murdock\" White"
<dale.wh...@NOinsightbb.NOcom> wrote:
> I have the X-FI sound card and it works fine, so I think I'll blame the
> firewire card. Good luck, glad it wasn't the hard drive, as that is just a
> pain.
>
> Just a side note, just because you dual boot and XP doesn't have a problem
> doesn't mean the drive is fine. I have a USB drive and that can read and
> write data on it all day, except to a certain point. it's a 160GB drive, the
> first 100-110GB seems fine, but if I load anything beyond that, nothing but
> errors. I've formatted it, fdisked it, but the errors seem pretty physical.
>
> It's possible that XP is loaded in the good space and Vista has a few bad
> blocks, plus vista does all that prefetching and search indexing.
>
> But given your problem description, add-on cards fighting for IRQs sounds
> like a better answer. (I'd still run a check disk to be sure)
>
> "news-server.texas.rr.com" <rocol...@qmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:3F9C2119-D6B0-4C42-B961-(E-Mail Removed)...
>
>
>
> >I have an XP/Vista dual boot configuration with a WD Raptor 150gb drive. It
> >runs perfectly under the XP boot so I don't suspect that.
>
> > But, there are lots of entries in that log you mentioned, none critical
> > but lots of ACPI errors. Its complaining about one of my add in cards not
> > having an IRQ. I have 2 of those, one a XFI sound card, the other a
> > firewire port. I'm going to remove both of those to see if that fixes the
> > problem.
>
> > "Dale "Mad_Murdock" White" <dale.wh...@NOinsightbb.NOcom> wrote in message
> >news:-audneOMOuP4i0bYnZ2dnUVZ_o-(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> >> Time to scrap that Dell and get a HP\Gateway\E-machine\Build your own !
>
> >> Just kidding. Sounds like your hard drive might be dying. If you look
> >> under Admintools (in the control panel) you should see the event viewer.
> >> Look under system. You'll probably see a bunch of read stop signs talking
> >> about DISK errors. If that's the case, I'd plan on getting a new HDD
> >> soon.
>
> >> You can open windows explorer, right click on the drive, choose
> >> properties, then tools and click the "check now" button.This will scan
> >> your disk and try to fix any errors. of course, if you drive is near
> >> death, this might just push it on over.
>
> >> newegg as the 320GB sata drive for $95. 
>
> >> "news-server.texas.rr.com" <rocol...@qmail.com> wrote in message
> >>news:ECFF95AB-7EF1-4D1B-813C-(E-Mail Removed)...
> >>> I've installed Vista Ultimate on my Dell E521. It runs, but every 10
> >>> minutes, the system 'pauses' for about 45 seconds. All disk activity
> >>> ceases. The UI is still active, but if I try to do anything that causes
> >>> disk activity (like starting another program), it waits until the
> >>> approximately 45 second 'countdown' ends. Everything thing works normal
> >>> for about another 10 minutes until another 'pause' hits.
>
> >>> I've installed the latest nVidia forceware drivers for my SATA drives
> >>> but that didn't make a difference.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -