Computer 'hiccups' every five seconds

[John Dolceamore]

Greetings to all,

I posted a variation of this the other day in what I thought was the
right Windows 2000 group, but apparently not.

Anyway, I'm new to Win2K, and I'm just about at my wits end with this
particular problem. It's intermittent, but when it's happening, every
five seconds or so everything freezes momentarily and I don't know
why.

I'm running Win2K Pro on a Pentium 4 system with a Soyo P4VGA
motherboard and 512 megs of RAM, all drivers are current, all service
packs and critical updates have been installed, and for virus and
spyware protection I'm using Norton Internet Security 2004, Ad-aware
6.0 and Spybot Search & Destroy, all of which I contently keep up to
date with the latest definitions.

I've searched Google for anything I could find on this, and I'm still
at a loss. Under the Processes tab of Task Manager, something called
csrss.exe shows about a 2% spike when the freezes happen, but in my
search I found that this is supposed to be running, and a subsequent
check at a time when the problem wasn't occurring showed this same
spike.

On the other hand, while usually if I shut down and restart, the
hiccuping goes away, I noticed that it was there as soon as I booted
up the computer for the first time today, i.e. before I did anything
at all.

If anyone can offer any clues at all about this it just might save me
from violently throwing things out the window, myself included ;-)

Thanks a lot,
John

 

[Alias]

I don't know if this will work but it can't hurt. Download MSCONFIG from
http://www2.whidbey.com/djdenham/Msconfig.htm and see what's loading at
start up.

Alias

 

[John Dolceamore]

Thanks Alias,

I downloaded MSCONFIG last month from somewhere when I realized it
wasn't a part of Windows 2000. There's a whole bunch of stuff loading
at start up - I just did some Google searches on a few of them to see
what they were and whether I could disable them, and between those and
the ones I know I can disable, there's about 7 or 8 so I can try that
and see what happens. I'll post back with any changes.

John

 

[Alias]

Here's a complete list with comments about what MSCONFIG finds:

http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

Alias

 

[Vance Green]

Try turning off auto-insert notification for your
CD drives. MSKB or Google for instructions.

 

[John Dolceamore]

Alias,

I tried using that site but I keep getting this message: "CGI-limits
reached, please try again later!"

Any idea what that means?

I did disable about 7 startup items, and I just finished running all
of my virus & spyware programs (found spyware but no viruses), but
dammit if it still isn't doing this hiccup thing. I even uninstalled
my Nero software because I came across something related to this other
weird problem I was having, where my CD drives would 'disappear'
following an error message about "unsafe removal of devices" or
something like that, and I thought maybe there was some correlation
there, but that didn't make a difference either.

Could there be some sort of conflict with my motherboard and something
else perhaps? How would I even determine something like that? This is
driving me nuts :-o

Thanks for trying to help.

John

 

[Alias]

I got the same thing with that site just now but I kept hitting F5 and it
came up. It was due to Internet traffic. Did you run both AdAware and
Spybot?

Look in your Device Manager to see if any of your devices got a question or
exclamation mark next to them. What exactly is in your MSCONFIG start up
list?

Alias

 

[Bill]

-----Original Message-----
Greetings to all,

I posted a variation of this the other day in what I thought was the
right Windows 2000 group, but apparently not.

Anyway, I'm new to Win2K, and I'm just about at my wits end with this
particular problem. It's intermittent, but when it's happening, every
five seconds or so everything freezes momentarily and I don't know
why.

I'm running Win2K Pro on a Pentium 4 system with a Soyo P4VGA
motherboard and 512 megs of RAM, all drivers are current, all service
packs and critical updates have been installed, and for virus and
spyware protection I'm using Norton Internet Security 2004, Ad-aware
6.0 and Spybot Search & Destroy, all of which I contently keep up to
date with the latest definitions.

I've searched Google for anything I could find on this, and I'm still
at a loss. Under the Processes tab of Task Manager, something called
csrss.exe shows about a 2% spike when the freezes happen, but in my
search I found that this is supposed to be running, and a subsequent
check at a time when the problem wasn't occurring showed this same
spike.

On the other hand, while usually if I shut down and restart, the
hiccuping goes away, I noticed that it was there as soon as I booted
up the computer for the first time today, i.e. before I did anything
at all.

If anyone can offer any clues at all about this it just might save me
from violently throwing things out the window, myself included ;-)

Thanks a lot,
John

Hello John..
Dont know if this will solve your problem but I had a
similar problem.
My hics. were from the indexing service trying to catalog
my harddrive... I just disable the service in
Administrator/services. You need to had administrator
privs. to change this. Right click on "My Computer" icon,
select "Manage"... go down the list to "services and
Applications" expand to reveal "Services" click on
services.. find "Indexing service".. right click and
select Properties... click on the "general" tab, about
half way down, it should have a box called Startup Type.
Click on the boxes' down arrow and change to manual. Also
you can stop the service right away by clicking on stop.
That is what I did, but your milage may vary!
Bill

 

[Dan Seur]

There is a small but finite chance this this hiccup-freezing is
disk-failure related.

Under-the-covers hardware access-retries early in an evolving
(progressive) disk failure can do this, especially when the access is
related to a high-priority system task that puts the rest of the system
in a wait state.

After a few, then a few dozen, then a few hundred [...] retries the
access may succeed. The activity is invisible to normal system logs.

In this scenario, the end is catastrophic failure of the drive.

Drive manufacturers all have downloadable drive diagnostics that can
identify such situations, occasionally correct them, and often get you a
free replacement drive after a conversation with tech support.

 

[John Dolceamore]

Thanks for the suggestions ;-)

Vance, I found the instructions for turning off auto-insert
notification & did that, I'll see if it makes any difference, and Bill
I went through the steps you provided to disable the indexing service
but when I got there it was already set to Manual - go figure ;-)

Alias, here's what's in the Startup list. The ones with no asterisk
have been disabled, although mobsync came back, and of the ones that
are still enabled, the first two are Symantec/Norton and the last two
are Adobe. I found very little via Google about VTPreset but it may
have to do with the graphics card, and I just found instructions for
properly disabling mobsync - don't know yet if it'll work ;-)

* ccApp
* UrlLstCk
* VTPreset
* mobsync
* Adobe Gamma Loader
* Acrobat Assistant
Version Cue Tray
Ink Monitor
loadqm
msnmgr
Nero Check
PPWebCap
qttask
mobsync
Microsoft Find Fast
Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar
Office Startup
reminder - Scansoft Product Registration

Oh, and I usually do run both spyware programs, AdAware then Spybot.

Thanks again,
John

 

[Alias]

Try taking the Adobe ones off and leave mobsync on. I would also take
VTPreset off and see what happens.

As another poster said, it could be a hardware issue so check your hard
disk.

Alias

 

[John Dolceamore]

Thanks Dan, I'll look into that. It's a new hard drive so I'd hope
that wasn't the problem but who knows. It's a Western Digital 60GB
drive that I actually bought last year, but I didn't break it out of
the plastic wrap until last month when I put this system together. I
guess I can just go to their site for these diagnostic tools? I'll
definitely check into it.

Thanks,
John

 

[John Dolceamore]

Well I went to the Western Digital site and downloaded their Data
Lifeguard utility. It ran a couple tests and said my hard drive is
functioning normally, so there's something else going on. Thanks for
the tip though - it's good to have something like that for
troubleshooting or ruling out future problems ;-)

John

Thanks Dan, I'll look into that. It's a new hard drive so I'd hope
that wasn't the problem but who knows. It's a Western Digital 60GB
drive that I actually bought last year, but I didn't break it out of
the plastic wrap until last month when I put this system together. I
guess I can just go to their site for these diagnostic tools? I'll
definitely check into it.

Thanks,
John

There is a small but finite chance this this hiccup-freezing is
disk-failure related.

Under-the-covers hardware access-retries early in an evolving
(progressive) disk failure can do this, especially when the access is
related to a high-priority system task that puts the rest of the system
in a wait state.

After a few, then a few dozen, then a few hundred [...] retries the
access may succeed. The activity is invisible to normal system logs.

In this scenario, the end is catastrophic failure of the drive.

Drive manufacturers all have downloadable drive diagnostics that can
identify such situations, occasionally correct them, and often get you a
free replacement drive after a conversation with tech support.

 

[John Dolceamore]

Try turning off auto-insert notification for your
CD drives. MSKB or Google for instructions.

Vance, I think this may have worked. It's been several days and not a
single hiccup. Thanks ;-)

John

 

[John Dolceamore]

Try taking the Adobe ones off and leave mobsync on. I would also take
VTPreset off and see what happens.

As another poster said, it could be a hardware issue so check your hard
disk.

Alias

Thanks Alias, I actually have been so busy for past few days that I
didn't see this until today, but the last thing I did seems to have
worked, which was to disable auto-insert notification for the CD
drives. I also changed the IDE cable even though it was new, in case
it had something to do with the "unsafe removal of device" message I
was getting every now & then. That problem hasn't returned either,
knock on wood. Anyway, thank you, I appreciate your feedback.

John