Stuttering video in Windows 2000

[Shukaido]

I've noticed that when I play a game in Win 2000, video sequences stutter every 4 or 5 seconds. This is my setup :

Celeron 300A
256M memory
2 15G HDs on primary channel
48x CDROM on secondary channel
Guillemot Prophet II mx

The 'stuttering' is an interruption in the sound and video for a fraction of a second, and it when it occurs, the HD and CD lights on my machine turn on. It's almost as if the file IO isn't being buffered adequately for directmedia. I've never encountered this problem in Win98.

Can anyone help me?

 

[jaywallen]

Hi,

Forgive my asking, but you didn't state specifically that you had enabled DMA on the CD-ROM. If you haven't done so, the way you check for it in W2K is slightly different from the way you do it in Win9X. Just go into the Device Manager and, instead of looking at the properties for the drives, examine the properties for the Primary and Secondary IDE Channels. On the Advanced tabs of those dialogs you should be using "Auto Detection" for Device Type and "DMA if available" for transfer mode for each live device.

Of course there are other possibilities that might explain the behavior of your system. If DMA was already enabled for the drives the problem could be anything from faulty drivers to improper cache settings in the registry. Are you using the CD-ROM drivers which came with W2K?

Hope this is helpful.

Regards,
jaywallen

 

[Shukaido]

<< On the Advanced tabs of those dialogs you should be using &quot;Auto Detection&quot; for Device Type and &quot;DMA if available&quot; for transfer mode for each live device.
>>



Yes, and it says that the current transfer mode is ultra DMA.

Also, I am using the CDROM drivers that came with win 2000.

 

[jaywallen]

No easy answers, eh?

I would expect your PC running W2K to produce only very slightly lower sustainable frame rates than it would when running Win98, but I suppose that varies from system to system. The fact that the &quot;stutter&quot; occurs on a more or less regular basis would seem to indicate that it might be possible to adjust operational behavior of the system to eliminate the stutter.

I would expect the playback software to be capable of optimizing playback parameters, especially given the memory resources on your PC. I've seen clean video playback on Pentium 120s with 32 MB RAM, but only from hard drive. I've seen clean video playback from CD-ROM / DVD-ROM on 500 MHz PIIIs and faster, but most of them had less RAM than your PC. Assuming that clean video playback direct from CD under W2K isn't simply too much to expect from the PC you're using (and I don't think it is), I'd be checking to be sure that the system was trimmed down to the minimum with respect to services and concurrent apps.

I imagine you've already tried this, as well as the other things I've suggested. I'm just going over basic ground. Have you tried disabling all items in the user and common startup groups, HKLM Run, and HKCU Run locations of your registry to see if this improves matters?

Look in the Startup folder for any current user under whose logon you run games.

And look in the registry at:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows:
Check the load REG_SZ and/or run REG_SZ values.

Also check these registry locations for items that start at boot time:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce

And have you examined your Services applet to see if you have any unnecessary services running automatically? Many services that run by default in W2K are not really necessary for proper function of a standalone workstation, or even for a system which makes only occasional use of network access. Of course an alternative to setting certain services to Manual or Disabled (Manual is safer unless you really KNOW you don't need the service.) is just to Stop them from the Services applet before you play a game. And if you wish to have a convenient way to enable / disable items in the aforementioned startup locations you might check Mike Lin's freeware applet Startup Control Panel at

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

Forgive me if this is covering roads you've been down.

Regards,
Jim