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Brief, Annoying Lockups

O

ouberlord

n00b
Joined
Jan 2, 2005
Messages
24
Hey all,

For about the last few months I have been experiencing instances of brief lockups in nearly every game I play (Halflife, Halflife 2, World of Warcraft, and others) as well as on the desktop (Browsing files, surfing the web, etc). These occurances last about a half second; during which in games the framerate drops to single digits, the controls lock up, and the last bit of sound loops until the instance is over. When this happens in normal desktop browsing I have only noticed the inability to move the mouse, scroll the mousewheel, or use the keyboard; music played in the bakcground continues to play. These brief freezes seem to happen fairly randomly. They also happen in games when I suddenly turn the corner into a large area full of new textures, or if a long sound file is loaded. This leads me to believe it might be a RAM issue, but the lockup of the controls worries me. Its a rather annoying problem, to say the least.

My system is a Pentium 4 2.53, 1024mb Kingston ValueRAM (DDR 333), Radeon X800 XT Pro (Latest Omega Drivers), Sound Blaster Audigy (Latest Drivers), DirectX (Latest v.), WinXP SP1. The system has never been overclocked, and the temperatures all seem to be ok (38C at idle, 49C at full load for a half hour) and do not peak as far as I can tell.

The way I see it, since the problem occurs both with video (large texture loads) and audio (large sound files), I wouldnt think it would be the video or sound cards or their drivers. I ran some RAM tests, but after an hour and a half no errors were found. I ran a full suite of spyware utilities and antivirus programs, both of which came up empty. All disks are defragged recently.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
 
One of my game machines was doing that right before the hdd crapped out...might not be the same thing in your case (you could actually here the drive heads clicking).

What memory tests did you run? I hope it was Memtest86, and you should proably run that overnight just to be safe.

Also, when did this start happening? Was it after a particular driver/program/update was loaded?
 
try moving your ram to different slots, i had that problem on my brand new athlon 64 system, and i switched the ram around and it works flawlessly now
 
It was memtest86, yes. Ill run it overnight tonight and report what I find. I really cant place when this started happening, maybe a little after I bought my new video card (Upgraded from a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 to a Radeon X800 XT Pro.

I could try moving the RAM around to troubleshoot, but that would mean that the motherboard has a problem then would it not? If there were a problem accessing the RAM, be it because of the RAM itself or a flaw in the mobo, wouldn't software like memtest pick up on it?
 
If it was after you bought your videocard, have you uninstalled the nVidia drivers, rebooted into Safe mode, ran Driver Cleaner 3.3 to remove the leftover nVidia files and ATi files, then install the new ATi drivers (while still in safe mode), and then reboot once again. You may want to try it with some WHQL-certified drivers, not the Omega drivers (for testing purposes).

Also, you may want to update to SP2 (it helps more than it hurts, I know a lot of people say otherwise, but forget those guys, I'm da friggina pope!...who you gonna believe?) :)
But Seriously consider going to SP2

As for if memtest86 detecting all memory errors, while it would be safe to say it can detect most, I would judge by the fact that it in itself is a program that is continuously revised, I would not rule out the possibility (no matter how slight it may be) that it can miss some strange or minute memory error. Chances are it won't though.

Let us know what happens.
 
Just out of curiosity, what type of mobo is it?

And you listed DDR330 in your post, you mean DDR333, right? Just wanna make sure there isn't some new DDR I don't know about.
 
Err, yeah, DDR333 :p

Memory test last night ran for a little over 7 hours, completed 8 passes, and found 0 errors. Im "pretty" sure that I totally removed the nVidia drivers from my PC (I think I actually did a full system wipe sometime after I got the card) but ill do a sweep again, it cant hurt, and Ill try the latest WHQL ATI drivers.

As for SP2, that thing scares the crap out of me, but ill give it a go anyway. Ive heard from two people that had to do a system wipe after installing SP2, but then ive also heard of people who havent had any trouble whatsoever.

The motherboard is an AOpen AX4SPE Max, unknown as to what BIOS I have on it.
 
IMHO SP2 fixes more problems than it causes.

But YMMV, I too have heard of some people that have had problems with SP2. But usually if SP2 makes your computer perform worse, something was fundamentally wrong with it before. But a full system wipe would be the last thing I tried (with an XP install w/ SP2 slipstreamed), before rma'ing the mobo.
 
Just installed SP2 (Which was a mostly smooth ride until I hit a snag. Apparently the stock WinXP drivers for my Broadcom NIC are incompatible with SP2 :p. Installing the vendor drivers fixed the issue) and I installed the latest WHQL certified ATI drivers. Im gonna give it a go and see what happens.
 
Well, the outright fps/control lock/sound loop problem hasnt happened, so thats a good sign. However, I am still getting huge FPS drops when new textures or large sounds come into play. Any ideas on where the bottleneck on this might be?

Im gonna still keep messing with it over the next couple days, but so far it looks like SP2 and the latest official driver set have sone some amount of good.
 
Have you checked for viruses and Spyware? That can seriously choke down your system more than you would believe.
Also, have you looked at the Task Manager to get an idea of whats running on your system? The more programs that are running means slower system performance. If too many programs are running, use msconfig (run it at the Run menu) to disable programs at startup. Most programs you don't need anyway, unless its software that runs game devices etc.
Check those things, as they can take quite a bit of performance from you.
 
You may also want to check the latest BIOS releases for you mb and see if any of those have fixes listed in their release notes. Be careful when flashing though.

And 4keatimj, are you still running off that machine? I thought mine was old :).
 
Ive tried two antivirus and five spyware programs, and all report that the system is clean. Both problems that I have been having also happen when the system is running completely lean as well as when i have things in the background running, but in either case the performance hit and duration remains the same.

There are bios upgrades, but the only additions add P4 Extreme Edition support, wireless card issues, and SATA RAID 1 degradation issues.
 
ohnnyj said:
And 4keatimj, are you still running off that machine? I thought mine was old :).
Click to expand...

Not at the moment, but I do. I usually play games on it (glide games, like Unreal Tournament), and type up assignments and stuff. It hasn't been on for a while, cause I got a new PS2 for christmas, but it has basically been on all day for the past month or so. It has been used heavily over the past six (!!!) years, and apart from the odd major hiccup it has worked marvellously, and still performs well for a machine of that age. But, I guess it could well pass as one of the oldest machine still in constant use by a member of these forums.
 
Okay, glad the lockups are somewhat gone.

The newest BIOS is always a good idea,.

Now, when you ran the AV and spyware programs, did you do it in safe mode, or better yet from a bootable OS (ie BartPE or WUBCD)?

Also, try a GOOD defrag of your hdd (like Raxco Perfectdisk) and turn off all unnecessary services (ie MS Wireless Config, Security Center, etc) and startup proggies.
 
Well, got the desktop version of the lockup twice so far today. The lockups are almost like when your harddrive is on standby, and how when you need to access files on it it takes a few moments for it to actually spin up to speed and start functioning.

Im gonna give that PerfectDisk a shot tonight and see what happens. Im iffy about the need to change the BIOS as its the same BIOS on the board as before when I had no trouble, but ill still keep it in mind.
 
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