Really confusing fault

[John]

People

Can anyone help?

My system set up is as follows:

Windows XP Home SP2
AMD XP 2800 (Barton)
1024Mb RAM DDR333
128Mb Ti4200 nVidia Geforce 4 Card

I have installed a number of games such as Far Cry, Imperial Glory,
Rome: Total War & Dues Ex: Invisible War and they al lseem to be
afflicted with the same problem: when I am in the game the action stops
and holds for a number of seconds and then continues.

It is most infuriating and perplexing as I do not have an idea what
causes it.

I have all of the latest drivers for all of the major components of the
pc. I have installed all of the latest patches for all of the games
mentioned above. I have re-installed Directx and nVidia drivers to no
avail - the system still freezes for a short period and then continues
(almost as much as once every 10-40 seconds or so).

I have noticed in task manager that the game I am in (this can be any
game) will show that it is using 100% of processor time but I cannot for
the life of me figure out why it needs to do that, especially since I
have lowered all of the performance requirements for graphics, sound, et
al.

One thing I have not done is to regress to an older version of nVidia
driver but I do not see what good that will do if I try it.

Does anyone have any clues or has anyone experienced this fault?

Many thanks

John

 

[Chris H.]

Try going into Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer and select
Application in the left pane. This will reveal events on the system in the
right pane which may include some marked with either yellow triangles
containing exclamation points or red circles with white X's in them. Those
can be right-clicked with a selection of Properties to reveal a portion of
the error message.

Knowing what correlates with the time of the error could lead to a solution.
BTW - Having the "latest" graphics driver may not work as well as the
previous one, in which case you could use Roll Back Driver in Device Manager
to revert to the previous one to see if it corrects the problem.
--
Chris H.
Microsoft Windows MVP/Tablet PC
Tablet Creations - http://nicecreations.us/
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -

 

[Yves Leclerc]

In order to correctly install any nVidia Forceware video card driver, you
need to make sure that you completely un-install the installed version of
the driver first. You need to also clean-up the left-over files/settings
that can cause problems. Head over to http://www.drivercleaner.net/ and get
DriverCleaner PE. You need to clean up even when going back to older
version of the drivers.

Make sure that you also have installed the motherbaord chipset drivers.

 

[John]

People

Can anyone help?

My system set up is as follows:

Windows XP Home SP2
AMD XP 2800 (Barton)
1024Mb RAM DDR333
128Mb Ti4200 nVidia Geforce 4 Card

I have installed a number of games such as Far Cry, Imperial Glory,
Rome: Total War & Dues Ex: Invisible War and they al lseem to be
afflicted with the same problem: when I am in the game the action stops
and holds for a number of seconds and then continues.

It is most infuriating and perplexing as I do not have an idea what
causes it.

I have all of the latest drivers for all of the major components of the
pc. I have installed all of the latest patches for all of the games
mentioned above. I have re-installed Directx and nVidia drivers to no
avail - the system still freezes for a short period and then continues
(almost as much as once every 10-40 seconds or so).

I have noticed in task manager that the game I am in (this can be any
game) will show that it is using 100% of processor time but I cannot for
the life of me figure out why it needs to do that, especially since I
have lowered all of the performance requirements for graphics, sound, et
al.

One thing I have not done is to regress to an older version of nVidia
driver but I do not see what good that will do if I try it.

Does anyone have any clues or has anyone experienced this fault?

Many thanks

John

Hi Everyone again

I have tried the suggestion mentioned above, thank you Chris, to no
avail. The system does not mention any error that holds on to processing
time in the fashion it does.

I have checked this again looking at the performance monitor - again it
shows 100% utilisation but no indication as to why it is happening or
what is causing it.

It happens with some applications as well, such as Netscape and Opera
browsers (that I have noticed).

Any clues at all?

I have a feeling that I may have to wipe the system and re-install all
over again.

One other thing - I have regressed nVidia drivers to 71.89 - this too
has no effect.

Thanks

John

 

[Chris H.]

What anti virus program are you running?
--
Chris H.
Microsoft Windows MVP/Tablet PC
Tablet Creations - http://nicecreations.us/
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -

 

[Neil]

Run the manufacturers diagnostic on your hard drive

My PC did something similar for a while before the hard drive died.

Back up anything you don't want to lose now!

 

[John]

What anti virus program are you running?

Thanks you Chris

I am running Grisoft AVG Free version - I did think of that and I have
tried the programs whilst disabling the virus checker, this did not
work. I even tried disabling Zone Alarm but hta did not make any
difference either.

I have a seperate secondary drive (Neil, thanks for the suggestion)
which I back up all my stuff to. This PC was a unit that I built from
scratch. I do not have a diagnostic tool that I can run on my hard disk
drive - are there any that you guys can suggset?

Many thanks

John

 

[David Candy]

Type clean boot troubleshooting in Help. EG, Acrobat and MS keyboard helper program will always throw me out of full screen in a game (only once for acrobat and a couple for type32.exe).

 

[Chris H.]

Did you truly disable the regular AV program you use, or just "exit" from
the Systray icon? Norton (and ZoneAlarm) have a habit of only closing the
icon down while continuing to run underneath in the background.
--
Chris H.
Microsoft Windows MVP/Tablet PC
Tablet Creations - http://nicecreations.us/
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

John wrote:

One expects a game to use 100% CPU during play, for the same reason
one expects there to be no "free" RAM when Windows is running.

Things that cause those sort of "wait" periods include:
- processor thermal protection (HD LED off)
- SVGA chipset thermal protection (HD LED off)
- sick HD retries (suspect if HD LED is on, not stuttering)
- network traffic issues or errors (disconnect networks)
- other traffic from peripherals (disconnect all to test)
- malware activity (HD LED may stutter or be off)

All of the above will mirror your mileage in that no ammount of
software version fiddling is going to help.

------------ ----- ---- --- -- - - - -

The most accurate diagnostic instrument
in medicine is the Retrospectoscope