Dell Vista problem - pauses every 10 minutes

[news-server.texas.rr.com]

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.

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

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.

 

[Neil]

I agree with Dale

back everything up, your drive could be dying! It happened to me just like
that.

You could check with the drives manufacturers to see if they have any
diagnostic programs on their website

Neil

 

[news-server.texas.rr.com]

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]

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)

 

[Clark]

I think I would at least open and watch Task Manager to see if something was
keeping the computer busy, like internet access or something being
compressed or virus scans, or some such activity.

Clark

 

[Chuck]

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.

 

[news-server.texas.rr.com]

More to add.
Checking event viewer, I found that every time my system would 'pause', an
event would be written in the log that indicated a warning of raid0 reset. I
went out and bought an add on SATA controller, but couldn't get my machine
to successfully boot from it. So I imaged Vista onto a slower SATA drive.
Been running 1 hour now with no problems. I turned indexing back on and did
everything else that would almost guarantee a 'pause' but it hasn't happened
yet.

 

[news-server.texas.rr.com]

I also had to reactivate Vista.

More to add.
Checking event viewer, I found that every time my system would 'pause', an
event would be written in the log that indicated a warning of raid0 reset.
I went out and bought an add on SATA controller, but couldn't get my
machine to successfully boot from it. So I imaged Vista onto a slower SATA
drive. Been running 1 hour now with no problems. I turned indexing back
on and did everything else that would almost guarantee a 'pause' but it
hasn't happened yet.

 

[Dale White]

There is a thread about that on Battlefield 2 and I was able to reproduce
that problem. I can be 10 mins into a game and then every goes to a crawl
(sucks if you're flying). I hooked up a second monitor and ran taskmanager
and resoruce monitor on it and found that vista was doing some heavy reads
of some of the client files. Since these files are 300-500MB zips, probabl
explains why it pauses for up to 30 secs.

I haven't found any reason it does it, unless punkuster is making the
request. And it seems to be fairly random times. it does "Seem" the longer
you play the less it does it. And I have 2GB of ram and it's only reporting
1.3Gb in use and very little pagefile usage.

I'm runnng mine on a single SATA drive