New computer pauses intermittently

[sous2817]

Hello everyone,

I've got an annoying problem and I was hoping someone could give me some insight....I recently put together a new machine and for some reason it pauses for a couple seconds every so often. The mouse works fine during the pause, but everything else freezes (sound loops, video freezes, keyboard doesn't respond). After the pause, everything catches back up. So if I'm typing and the computer freezes, if I continue to type, it will show up once the computer unfreezes. I've checked for spyware and turned off antivirus software in case it was a system scan with no results. Drivers are up to date. Here are my system specs...

NVIDIA ChainTech 6600GT 128MB PCI-16
GIGABYTE GA-8I915P DUO PRO 915P
SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY 2 ZS
Corsair 512MB DDR2-533 PC2-4200 x2 (1 gig total, running dual channel)
Western Digital WD Caviar 80GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer x2 (running RAID 0)
Intel Pentium® 4 540 Processor Prescott 3.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, Socket 775, 1MB Cache (HT enabled)
Stock Heatsink and fan w/ Artic Silver 5
Logisys CS888UVBL Assembled UV Blue Acrylic Case (Clear)
Antec 480 watt 120mm fan ATX 12V v2.0 power supply, Active PFC, Model "NeoPower"
4 case fans (one on front pulling air in, two on side pushing air out, one on back pushing air out)
2 PCI cards (firewire card and a slot fan)
WinXP Pro SP2

I've put together several other machines and never had this problem. There are three things that I did differently this time, used a PCO-16 graphics card, a CPU with HyperThreading, and RAID0ed the HDDs. I've checked the heat and that's not an issue. I do not think it's the power supple, 480 watts should be more than enough; and I'm not overclocking. I've tried putting my pagefile on the max setting (2gigs min, 4gigs max) and that didn't help. Right now I've set it to Windows managing the pagefile with no improvement.

I've searched the boards and have seen some suggest a separate HDD for the pagefile. Would that make a difference? I have a suspicion that it's the RAID0 HDD. But I was hoping to get some other input before I unRAIDed the HDDs and started over. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!


Thanks,
sous2817

 

[timswim78]

What software are you running? Anything other than SP2?

 

[sous2817]

Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security are the two big ones. I've disabled both of them and still get the pauses. Other than that nothing out of the ordinary....

 

[daveybrat]

try uninstalling your antivirus and internet security completely, reboot and see how things go.

I've had symantec's internet security cause performance issues on customer's pc's. And disabling it doesn't seem to help, just uninstalling does. try it

 

[sous2817]

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it when I get home. Can you recommend equavalent programs to NAV and NIS? I'd rather not go through all this effort just to have it tanked by a virus or trojan.

Thanks,
sous2817

 

[montag451]

ZonealarmFREE or Kerio or Sygate for the Firewall
and
AVGFREE or Panda or zonealarm for the Antivirus

 

[sous2817]

I've uninstalled NAV and NIS with no luck. I'm going to start shutting down processes and see if there's something weird about that. If that doesn't work I guess I'll invest in an external HDD, back up my system and unRAID the HDDs. If that doesn't fix it, it's got to be the video card.

Does anyone know of a good backup software package? Preferably something easy to use that images the HDD so I can put my system back the way it was (file wise) after unRAIDing.

Thanks,
sous2817

 

[TheLonelyPhoenix]

Before you reformat, just give this a try: hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and check on your running processes and network usage. While at idle, your System Idle process should have about 98-99% of the CPU. If something else is taking up more than 2% of the processor while your idle (no programs running), you've got a trojan. If you post the process name here (or just Google it yourself), you'll probably find out more about it, and a method to remove it.

 

[sous2817]

thanks for the advice...I've got about 44 processes running, which has always bothered me becasue that seems like a lot. I'll start googleing and if I hit something weird I'll ask.

sous2817

 

[sous2817]

I've been googleing my processes and so far nothing too alarming except every single service started by Microsoft (svchost.exe is loaded 3 times, lsass.exe., services.exe, winlogon.exe, etc.) Most of the information I got from liutilities.com. What makes me nervous is that fact that they are apparently criticial for system stability or they are a virus/trojan. Is there any way to check? Should they all be located in c:\windows\system32. Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
sous2817

 

[montag451]

Best way would be to run the updated versions of the following in SAFE MODE:
ADAWARE
SPYBOT
TROJANHUNTER
AVGfree - or your favourite Antivirus sw,
SpySweeper

All these things can be dl for free for trial versions.

Run them all in safe mode,
reboot back into safe mode if ANYTHING was found.
Run them all again in safe mode.
If anything is found, then reboot into safe mode again and try once more.
If nothing is found, reboot to normal mode, and run all the scans in normal mode.

All of this is taking for granted that you have your firewall installed correctly whilst booting back to normal mode, if you are connected to the net

 

[sous2817]

Thanks for all the advice...looks like I've got a busy night ahead of me. I did find severl Norton processes that are still running even though I've removed Norton from my machine. So does my original problem seem more like a software rather than a hardware problem? I can't seem to find someone who's had a hardware problem when I do a google search for my symptoms (RAID lag, video lag, system pause, hardware lag, etc). I'll keep my fingers crossed that it's a software problem.

Thanks again!
sous2817

 

[Brassman]

TTT - I have the same problem w/a diff. setup running SP2. Lemme know via PM if you solve this. I'll do the same.

 

[Agamar]

Sounds like an IRQ / DMA issue. Have you tried moving your peripherals to different slots?

 

[sous2817]

******UPDATE******

It seems that I have fixed my problem. I'm not sure exactly what I did, but below is a list of everything I did in one night. The problem was there before I started this, and it was gone after I finished. Hope this helps...

1) updated BIOS - I did this when I first installed the MoBo and there wasn't an update since, so this can probably be skipped.

2) reinstalled the chipset drivers

3) installed drivers for onboard LAN - was originally using generic Window's installed driver

4) installed Intel's Application Accelerator for chipsets with ICH6R/ICH5R - from their website


That was it. No more pauses after that! Like I said, I don't know which made the difference but one (or more) definitely did. I'd like to thank everyone for his or her help. If it weren?t for these forums I would have scrapped the whole machine and started over, which would have gone over like a ton of bricks with the wife.

Thanks again!
sous2817

 

[Brassman]

Hey bud,

I solved mine too - though I know exactly what it was. I updated the drivers of my Netgear Wireless NIC to a diff. brand of drivers (non-netgear..I think it's called Athena or something) and that solved the problem.