Mouse locking up, video stuttering...

[Guest]

I'm having a problem with my Vista Business installation. Sometimes, for no
apparent reason, it locks up for a couple of seconds at a time with about 40
seconds apart. During this time the mouse don't move, I can't type, if I'm
watching some video it freezes and so on. I have no anti virus besides
OneCare installed and the problem was there before I installed that. I've
tried shutting down all open applications but it happens anyway. Then it goes
away by itself only to come back maybe 20 minutes later. I've tried looking
in the task manager to see if i can spot any process taking up the CPU but I
see nothing suspicious.

I've made two screenshots of how the performance tab looks like in the task
manager when I'm watching a video, one with the problem "active" and one
where it's behaving a bit better.

No problem -> http://i19.tinypic.com/4c7xv6c.png
Problem -> http://i7.tinypic.com/3y29zep.png

I've noticed that there's one active process more in the second picture but
I don't think that's it.

 

[Rock]

I'm having a problem with my Vista Business installation. Sometimes, for
no
apparent reason, it locks up for a couple of seconds at a time with about
40
seconds apart. During this time the mouse don't move, I can't type, if I'm
watching some video it freezes and so on. I have no anti virus besides
OneCare installed and the problem was there before I installed that. I've
tried shutting down all open applications but it happens anyway. Then it
goes
away by itself only to come back maybe 20 minutes later. I've tried
looking
in the task manager to see if i can spot any process taking up the CPU but
I
see nothing suspicious.

I've made two screenshots of how the performance tab looks like in the
task
manager when I'm watching a video, one with the problem "active" and one
where it's behaving a bit better.

No problem -> http://i19.tinypic.com/4c7xv6c.png
Problem -> http://i7.tinypic.com/3y29zep.png

I've noticed that there's one active process more in the second picture
but
I don't think that's it.

Check if the drive is in PIO mode instead of DMA. Start Orb | Type Device
manager | Click on it (or if not running as an administrator right click and
choose Run as Administrator). Expand the a hard drive controller section,
double click on the Channel, and click the Advanced Settings tab. PIO or
DMA?

 

[Guest]

I checked the device manager as you said and two of the channels have DMA
activated and the other two don't have the option on the advanced settings
tab.

http://i7.tinypic.com/2l8vgk7.png
The ones i highlighted have the DMA checkbox checked.

I could also mention my computers specification:
Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz
1535 MB RAM
One 250 GB HDD and two 120 GB in RAID 0 on promise 378
asus p4p800-e mother board
ati radeon 9800 pro 128 MB
sound blaster audigy se

 

[Rock]

I checked the device manager as you said and two of the channels have DMA
activated and the other two don't have the option on the advanced settings
tab.

http://i7.tinypic.com/2l8vgk7.png
The ones i highlighted have the DMA checkbox checked.

I could also mention my computers specification:
Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz
1535 MB RAM
One 250 GB HDD and two 120 GB in RAID 0 on promise 378
asus p4p800-e mother board
ati radeon 9800 pro 128 MB
sound blaster audigy se

Ok sorry that didn't help. It was a flyer. Just saw a problem similar to
yours in the XP newsgroup and that's how it was resolved. The next step
would be to look at the video driver.

 

[Guest]

Ok sorry that didn't help. It was a flyer. Just saw a problem similar to

yours in the XP newsgroup and that's how it was resolved. The next step
would be to look at the video driver.

I updated my driver to the catalyst that came out jan 29 but that didn't
help. I made some more screen shots after I discovered that only one of the
two cpu's are used during the spikes. I know that it's not actually two cpu's
but it looks that way in task manager because of the hyperthreading. Maybe
Vista doesn't like hyperthreading?

http://i7.tinypic.com/35lxbo3.png problem
http://i5.tinypic.com/2remdn7.png plain

This time I rebooted the computer, installed the new video driver and let it
idle. Then I took the first screen shot and when it started freezing again I
closed all applications and let it idle again. The red marks are cpu spikes
created by me when i opened snipping tool and when i made the window larger.

 

[jo]

I had similar problems with an oem drive controller using a promise chip. If
you have something different to try. It could help

 

[Guest]

I think that was it! I updated the promise 378 driver to a newer one for
xp/win2003 and this time I used the driver for win 2003. The problem seems to
have gone away. So don't use promise 1.00.1.37, use the 1.00.1.39 instead.

Should I generally use a driver for win 2003 instead of a xp driver when
that's the only choices I have for vista?

 

[Guest]

Looks like I spoke too soon. The problem still exists and judging from the
resource manager it has no correlation with the disk activity but of course I
could be wrong there.

And to be clear about the setup I use, I have Vista on the hdd controlled by
intel ich5 and the promise 378 only controls the raid unit which only holds
my music, videos and games. But the problem still occurs when playing video
from the other hdd as well as when the computer's just idling.