Stalling Q6600

[bluxa]

Hi,

I recently put together this system:

Q6600 (G0)
Asus P5K-E/WiFi
Antec P150 case
Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme
Asus EN8600GT Silent (passive cooling)
Transcend DDR2-800 RAM (1GB x 2)
Samsung HD501LJ hard drive SATA (set as ACHI in bios)
Asus DVD
Windows XP SP2


The system is not overclocked so is running at stock 2.4GHz and stock memory timings.

The problem is every so often the system seems to stall for a few seconds for no reason on menial tasks such as opening a folder. This is without any kind of significant load, i.e. just firefox and a few other windows open.

I updated to the latest Bios a couple of days ago, but cant remember if the problem occurred before the update. Its happened a couple of times already today. I'm wondering if anyone has had the same problem or can give me some advice.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Is DMA enabled for the hard disks? Chipset drivers installed?

 

[bluxa]

Chipset drivers are installed. I wasn't aware of DMA but just did a bit of research and it seems it can only be enabled for SATA drives in rare cases. mine isn't one of those cases and has no option for it. Any other ideas?

 

[Cutthroat]

Anything in your error logs?

 

[bluxa]

Thanks Cutthroat hadn't thought of that. Just checked and it seemed the last time it could have been caused by a bad block on one of the hard drive partitions. Although this error has been logged as happening over a few seconds it is only listed on one occasion so doesnt really explain why the stalling happened on the previous occasions. It is possible that it could have been caused by different factors on different occasions - i reckon that it has stalled maybe 4 or 5 times. i will check the error log as soon as it happens next time to see if what it says. It is always possible that it is something to do with XP and not the hardware. The other errors in the log relate to issues that I was aware of so are not related.

I'll also run chkdisk on the drive and see what that brings up.

 

[bluxa]

I also forgot to mention when it happens all the icons on the desktop lose their images, only the placement boxes show. One the system gets back into gear the images ripple back.

 

[exdeath]

Sounds like an I/O problem somewhere. Remove everything but the hard drive and video card, and disable anything on board in the BIOS and see how it runs? You could use performance monitor and check interrupt counts and IOs to see exactly what is going on.

Also do you have the correct HAL and kernel for SMP and have proper ACPI settings in the BIOS? (ie: you didn't go from a single core install to quad core and not reinstall Windows or change ACPI mode or anything funny like that)

 

[bluxa]

Thanks for reply. The ACPI has proper settings in the bios for multiprocessor. I did realise though that the memory settings were wrong in the Bios (6-6-6-18 or something like that) so I put in what it should be 5-5-5-12. I'm not sure if this could have had a bearing. I've also run chkdsk on the hard drive so I'll monitor it over the next few days before taking anything off the motherboard. I have now also overclocked the CPU to 3GHz so I'll also monitor if that has any negative effects.

 

[jjzelinski]

Is your hard drive thashing its swap file? That's a clue if it is.

Another thing to keep in mind is that AHCI is a pita for some reason. It's always been problematic on DS3's for instance and takes quite a bit of massaging to get right. I recommend for the time being your disable AHCI (thereby turning NCQ off, which I think is the culprit) as well as SATAII. Try to get it SATAI instead. Disabling Native Command Queuing and SATAII will have hardly any adverse performance effects so if you're happy with the way it performs without them I'd suggest you leave it that way, otherwise you're facing an uphill climb trying to get them to work properly. And btw, NCQ is more for server applications and in some cases can actually HINDER desktop performance so keep that in mind.

 

[bluxa]

Thanks jjzelinski, not really sure what you mean by thrashing the swap file, but I do feel the problem is related to the Hard drive. I'll try disabling AHCI and SATA II and see if that fixes the problem. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it will!

 

[jjzelinski]

Originally posted by: bluxa
Thanks jjzelinski, not really sure what you mean by thrashing the swap file, but I do feel the problem is related to the Hard drive. I'll try disabling AHCI and SATA II and see if that fixes the problem. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it will!

WHat I was trying to say was that your OS is referring waaay to much to virtual memory. If you don't know what virtual memory is, it's a file located on your hard drive that acts like RAM when you run out of physical RAM to use. Since it's electromechanical and not solid state like memory, it's obviously ALOT slower. If your hard drive is constantly being accessed (ie, lights blinking like crazy) chances are your swap file/virtual memory is going nuts.

Naturally you would relate the above statement to insufficient RAM but don't. It's definitely how your HD is interfacing with the OS.

 

[bluxa]

I couldnt find an option for the drive to run as SATA I. To disable AHCI I think I have to run the drive as IDE. While I was looking in the BIOS I also noticed that the JMicron Controller was enabled so I decided to disable this and see what happened. So far things seem OK, although this does not seem to be a long term fix as should I use an eSATA this would need to be enabled. If this doesn't solve the problem then I'll try running the drive as IDE and see what happens, at least that should confirm that its a driver issue, which should help in finding a more permanent solution.

EDIT: the JMicron controller change didnt work, so will run the drive in IDE mode and see if it happens in that. Any ideas anything else I could try?

 

[nineball9]

You may be running one of those silly services which check for updates every 15 minutes or so. Software for many HP printers do this as well as other obnoxious update programs. I turn 'em off!

Activity by some antivirus suites may cause stalling depending on how they are configured.

You may wish to poke around your services and processes to see what is running on your system. Good luck!

 

[bluxa]

Thanks for the advice Nineball9. It hadnt ocurred to me to do that. just went into msconfig and stopped a few programs from running at start. This included a couple of Jmicron entries and the wireless adapter ,which I'm not using at the mo. had actually turned it off but the software for it still comes appears at start-up. Not sure if this will make any difference, but we shall see. The stalling seems to be happening for longer than it used to - not a good sign.

 

[jjzelinski]

If you have another set of SATA sockets try them instead.

 

[bluxa]

Thanks jjzelinski, my next move was to do that then to try new cables if that didnt work. It hasn't happened today so checking the start-up progs may have done it (fingers crossed). i did some more googling and found someone else had a similar problem and it turned out that it was linked to the wi-fi. They had used wi-fi but were currently running on cable. wi-fi seemed to cause a problem in this case, it stopped when they disabled the wi-fi adapter. I had done a similar thing but had turned the wi-fi adapter off but the wifi prog still ran in system tray (tho it stated that wi-fi was off), but perhaps it wasnt enough. It could also have been the J-micron start-up progs.

 

[bluxa]

I thought it had been sorted, but it just happened again. The hard drive seems to get quite active when it happens even everything on the screen is frozen.

will try changing the cable ports and see what happens.

 

[bluxa]

I have now done everything that I can think of except change the cables, but I have a feeling the problem is stemming from a setting somewhere. I was playing an old game today - starcraft - when I exit out of it everything freezes. The more thats going on in the game before I finish the longer it freezes up for. It may be something related to the graphics card setting but the problem remains after I have changed settings. the game itself runs fine its only when I close and go to the desktop that the problem occurs - maybe some windows xp conflict somewhere? It looks like something is running at a speed out of sink with everything else and the freezing is basically waiting for whatever it is to catch up. Anyone any ideas - its driving me crazy!!!

 

[airhendrix13]

Hi there!

I might have a solution for you, but it kinda requires that you trust me, which Know can be hard seeing as I am "just some random guy in a forum". Basically it is a short script that will keep the Kernal in RAM. This avoids the kernal from running on the HDD and will hopefully boost performance.

If you aren't comfortable running this, I understand, but if you are, let me know if this helps out.

Dim wshShell, RegKey
Set wshShell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
RegKey = "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\"

If wshShell.RegRead(RegKey & "ClearPageFileAtShutdown") Then
If MsgBox("ClearPageFileAtShutdown = 1, Set to 0?", vbQuestion + vbYesNo, "DisablePagingExecutive") = vbYes Then
wshShell.regWrite RegKey & "DisablePagingExecutive", 00000000, "REG_DWORD"
End If
Else
If MsgBox("ClearPageFileAtShutdown = 0, Set to 1?", vbQuestion + vbYesNo, "DisablePagingExecutive") = vbYes Then
wshShell.regWrite RegKey & "DisablePagingExecutive", 00000001, "REG_DWORD"
End If
End If

Paste this script into Windows Notepad and save the file with the name "kernalram.vbs". Double click on the file name to execute it and a popup message box will display the value of the DisablePagingExecutive key on your computer and ask if you want to change it. If the DisablePagingExecutive key is set to one, clicking on the "Yes" button will change it to zero. If it's set to zero, clicking on the "Yes" button will change it to one.

When you restart Windows, the new configuration will take effect.

So basically, you want this set to 1, and if something is wrong or you see no difference, just run it again and that will change it back to 0.

Hope this helps,

Ryan

 

[bluxa]

Hi airhendrix13, thanks for this - I'll give it a try. I had already changed the DisablePagingExecutive to 1 It didn't solve the problem unfortunately it. I'll let you know if this works.

 

[bluxa]

Thanks airh, but unfortunately it didnt work, the prob is still there - anyone else any ideas?