Odd issuse...

BeerCheeze · Posted: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:33:08 Post Subject: Odd issuse...

Ok, I rebuilt Misty's old computer and gave it to her cousin who's living with us now. However there is a strange problem (that I guess was there before but Misty forgot to tell me about it Bang Head

).

The system has the "jitters".... it will have small hangs (like for fractions of a second) when your doing things. For example when you move the mouse around quickly (like circle motions) it will move pause move pause, etc... When playing music (locally, across the network, from a CD, etc...) it "skips".

I thought it might be an issues with the video card (because when I was looking at it before I turned off the visualizations in Media player and the skips seemed to have gone a way... but I retested and this is not true). But now I'm not sure.... I'm leaning towards the motherboard. Here's the specs:

AMD XP1800+ (Stock)
512 MB PC2100 (2x256) (Different RAM then before the rebuild)
Asus A7V266 (using onboard sound)
Hercules GF2 GTS 32MB AGP
40GB ATA66 7200 RPM HDD

These are new parts that weren't in the system before the rebuild:
NetGear Wireless NIC
CD Burner

My thougths are MoBo or maybe HDD?? Anyone seen something like this before?

Enforcer · Posted: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 13:48:50 Post Subject:

I had similar issues, but in my case I saw the HDD going off like a madman whenever it did, My HDD was behaving exactly like it was downed to EIDE or IDE speeds instead of DMA133. It would skip on simple noises as it had to load them, would skip while watching video every now and then, and would pause the whole computer while I waited for whatever it was accessing. It was easier to pinpoint though since I could watch the HDD light going off whenever my computer frooze up. Anyways something to look at. (The drive that went out on me was a Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM 8MB cache)

EDIT: At the same time i was having these issues, my dvdrom kicked out and stopped reading discs all the time, and would also power off (the HDD and dvdrom were on seperate rails and voltages were ok) on its own, causing lockups in the system, though I removed the drive and I still had the pauses with the HDD accessing.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 13:54:39 Post Subject:

Hmmmm ok... thanks.

I did have to replace her old burner as it went belly up (but it was an old 4X burner so I just thought it's time had passed).

T-shirt · Posted: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 18:15:17 Post Subject:

What OS? Have you checked what processes are active?
try disconnecting/disabling all but nessesary hardware and see what happens.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 19:34:07 Post Subject:

It's XP SP1, brand new fresh install. And I have changed everythign but:

HDD
Video Card
CPU
Motherboard.

Everything else is new/different from the old setup, but still having the same problem. All drivers are latest.

T-shirt · Posted: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 02:17:27 Post Subject:

what do the process logs say?
I had similar problems with a cordless mouse, ended up being a bad battery contact.
but since your's is effecting playback, I'm thinking a service is going nuts.

bruceModn · Rated NC-17 Joined: 06 Mar 2004 Posts: 155 Location: texas

I had a similar problem with my system, I would be playing hearts and the mouse would freeze for 3 seconds, I'd hear my hard drive spin up and my mouse would return. After about 3 reboots my hard drive was not recognized and i exchanged it. Hard drive: Maxwell SATA 120GB

BeerCheeze · Posted: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 11:52:41 Post Subject:

Update - There are no services running nuts (I checked this before and verified last night)

I did find something odd.... The -5.0v rail. When it started it's "skipping" the rail would drop into the -3v range from the -4.7 range.

So I'm leaning at either a funky PSU, or a bad MoBo (i.e. voltage regulator). What ya think?

Enforcer · Posted: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:02:43 Post Subject:

Hmm, a spike in the draw to the mobo, or a minor brownout on the PSU. Interesting problem. I suppose hooking up a different PSU to look at the draws could be easy enough, especially since the system as a whole isn't drawing much in the way of devices.

T-shirt · Posted: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 16:30:26 Post Subject:

If you have another PSU thats the quickest check.
Or unplug a check the MB connector for burnt contacts/lose connectors.
also unplugging everything but the MB, video card and hard drive might help eliminate some potential problems.
with a new PSU it is possible that you got a bad one
if it was dropping to 3 volts I'm suprized it just didn't crash right away