STUTTERING HARD DRIVE--HELP!!!

Phat3800

Member
Feb 13, 2001
32
0
0
Hi--recently I purchase a Dell 8100 1.3ghz p4. It has 128 meg of pc800 RDRAM and a Maxtor 40 gig Ultra ATA 100 hard drive. As soon as I received the system I blew out the hard drive and installed a fresh version of Windows ME on a single partition. Since that time I've noticed that my games, including Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, etc, freeze occasionally for a few seconds. The sound stutters as well. It recovers, but it's VERY annoying, b/c I usually end up dying in the game. I've defragged the hard drive, tweaked virtual memory settings, everything. I've even disabled ALL startup items except for systray and Explorer. STILL does it. Do I need more memory? Do I have a bad hard drive? HELP!! The last thing I want to do is format the drive again and install 98, but I will if it will fix this problem. HELP!!
 

LeeBear

Member
Jan 23, 2001
51
0
0
It sounds like you don't have DMA enable on your hard drive's and CD. Goto Device Manager and make sure there's a checkmark on "DMA" for your hard drives and CD-ROMS, that should get rid of the stuttering.

-LeeBear
 

Nih

Senior member
Sep 3, 2000
334
0
0
Have you tried setting a <10 gig partition specifically for the o/s?
 

Nih

Senior member
Sep 3, 2000
334
0
0
I would go to the Maxtor site and get the hdd diagnostic utility and run it to see if the drive is defective