"stuttering" I think it may be the harddrive?

[Korporativ]

Rescently i've been having problems(just started a little over a week ago) with games and other aplications freezing for a minor amount of time... a sort of "stutter" where the video and sound freeze up. I had been using diskkeeper to defragment and it tolkd me I had no problems with fragmentation. HOwever, I tried using the windows default to see how accurate it was and it seemed unable to defragment any more than 2% of the drive at any given increment. Any ideas? I'm afraid the harddrive is on its way to a slow horrible death. (btw im in Windows XP atm and have run the "scandisk" for this OS.)

 

[anandfan]

* bump for weekend readers *

What is your hardware config: cpu, sound card, motherboard?

Did the start of this problem coincide with any hardware/driver/software changes? The times I've had this problem, it occurred with the addition of new hardware. If the problem just occurred spontaneously, you could first try reseating all the cards (corrosion of contacts possible), check the cpu temp (HS might have been knocked loose), run diagnostics on the drive.

I don't know why you can only defragment only 2% of the disk at a time. How about rebooting into SafeMode and doing the defragment.

 

[Korporativ]

ACtualy i just redownloaded diskeeper and let that defragment it but I dunno if thats helping or what. It happened sporaticaly at first and only in a few games(specificly direct3d) now its occuring in things like UT2003 etc. It is also like 'pausing' when I'm running winamp and open some web pages(really should NOT be happening) I'm running an Athlon 2500 Barton core with 1 gig of 400FSB corsair ram, My soundcard is admittedly the weak point(turtle beach santa cruz... my old soundblaster was causing problems so i picked this up for like $30) I havn't really changed any hardware in a while... I did reseat my soundcard and everything else to clear up IRQ conflicts but that was about a month or two(i doubt corrosion would have set in by then) My CPU is running at 37*C or so usualy so i doubt thats the problem. What sort of harddrive diagnostics would you reccomend? I'm also running a striped page file under windows XP professional ... helps a lot.