System Idle Process = 98% CPU Usage = 40% ??

[fishfinger]

M-Audio Delta 24/96, has upto date drivers and i think the asio drivers were a part of that software package.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers several times because i assumed it was a problem with the sound card, given the manifested problems, but even without sound being used the CPU seems to be over taxed.

You should be using The "M-Audio ASIO driver" NOT the general multimedia one. That is Steinbergs driver for cards that don't support ASIO.

Do you have a built-in sound card on your motherboard? if so, have you disabled it?

Also, Are you on XP? and what service pack?

 

[Dravinian]

You should be using The "M-Audio ASIO driver" NOT the general multimedia one. That is Steinbergs driver for cards that don't support ASIO.

Do you have a built-in sound card on your motherboard? if so, have you disabled it?

Also, Are you on XP? and what service pack?

As I say i think it is the M-audio ones.

I do have inbuilt sound and it is disabled. It is XP Service Pack2.

 

[Dravinian]

I have done the restore now and it is running fine so doing a defrag, then will run antivir, then will run spybot.

At the moment of course it is running fine, but I won't be holding my breath that it will last.

 

[fishfinger]

It's not XP media centre edition is it?

 

[Dravinian]

It's not XP media centre edition is it?

Oh god no.

fine again, running defrag, posting fine, cpu usage at 2%-20%, though I do have the defragger running in stealth mode, but you ahve to understand, I couldn't even get the start button to open up properly to get to Accessories/System Tools to run System Restore, because it kept hanging up.

And nothing was running.

It will be fine for awhile, just I don't know how long it will last before it goes off again.

 

[fishfinger]

Oh god no.

Phew!

 

[Dravinian]

To put it into context, now running defragged, winamp playing an MP3 and watching a TV show in ZoomPlayer.

At the same time I started up newsleecher and not a single break up of sound, no slowdown, no stopping. Newleecher is a CPU whore by the way, that thing sucks power.

This leads me to believe it is not the sound, not the drivers of the sound.

I think it might be something to do with the charge being passed to the processor....can/does the sofware control this? I am thinking that perhaps something is happening that is causing the charge going to the CPU to be very low, so that effectively instead of being a 3.8ghz chip it simply becomes a .8ghz chip and given XP requirements it turns the entire machine into something from the 1980s.

? is that even possible? just a curious idea i came up with based on my very limited knowledge of PCs.

 

[ExtraRefined]

I believe the issue in the OP - CPU load which isn''t shown in Task Manager - is just an artefact of CPU being used below the OS kernel level, ie by the motherboard chipset / onboard audio / RAID controller.

 

[Dravinian]

Another reason I thought it might be something to do with Charge and CPU Speed is occasionally when my machine is pushed to the limit, starting up a graphics heavy game, it will seem to step up a gear, it will whirr a little louder as if it is working a little harder.

I always assumed this was me pushing the CPU as games tend to ask a lot of CPUs and that it was thus getting more charge and creating more cycles for the programs to work from.

This doesn't happen when the above is going on, it is running at 100%, but it is running silent, as it is now with just 2% going.

I don't really understand what has happened or what is happening when the machine seems ot step up a gear, I have a few assumptions I made but my understanding is really lapse here.

eta: thinking about it now, it might be the Graphics card stepping up a gear, always thought it was the CPU fan, but maybe something else?

GeForce BFG 7600GT is the card.

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

what you consistantly give wrong, bad and frankly pc destroying advice to people which will not help them but will almost certainly place them in an even worse position. Claiming some faux authority on it when it is patently obvious to most people that your advice is horseshit.

stop doing it people will stop mentioning that your giving out bad advice.

simple really.

Dravinian, have you got anything which has an auto update on it?

has your AV or fire wall had any updates recently?

I know when zonealarms updated recently it absolutly froze up people machines because an MS update conflicted and it would lock up people machines. So in that respect have you applied any recent updates to your OS too?

 

[Dravinian]

what you consistantly give wrong, bad and frankly pc destroying advice to people which will not help them but will almost certainly place them in an even worse position. Claiming some faux authority on it when it is patently obvious to most people that your advice is horseshit.

stop doing it people will stop mentioning that your giving out bad advice.

simple really.

Dravinian, have you got anything which has an auto update on it?

has your AV or fire wall had any updates recently?

I know when zonealarms updated recently it absolutly froze up people machines because an MS update conflicted and it would lock up people machines. So in that respect have you applied any recent updates to your OS too?

Nah, I am a like one of those old misery guts that live in a shack in the forest living with Gas lamps.

As I said earlier my last update on the AntiVir software was 2 years ago. That is what I am like, and nothing on my machine is on automatic update, cause I can never remember what was free and what was ripped so don't want anything to update, just incase it stops it working.

 

[Silva]

The stuttering sound thing happened to me, and after doing what proved to a completely unnecessary XP re-installation found out the Firewall (Kerio, I think) without any reason started conflicting with something. Once it was uninstalled, everything worked great once again.

Try to (carefully) disable background applications, including security stuff and drivers/hardware monitors.

 

[fishfinger]

eta: thinking about it now, it might be the Graphics card stepping up a gear, always thought it was the CPU fan, but maybe something else?

GeForce BFG 7600GT is the card.

When you start playing a game, the graphics card starts to heat up, and the fan on it goes faster. Also, your CPU fan will get faster when the CPU is under load.

Also, you keep mentioning a 3.8 GHz processor - there aren't any so my next guess is that it is an Athlon 3800+

 

[Dravinian]

When you start playing a game, the graphics card starts to heat up, and the fan on it goes faster. Also, your CPU fan will get faster when the CPU is under load.

Also, you keep mentioning a 3.8 GHz processor - there aren't any so my next guess is that it is an Athlon 3800+

Yeah it is an Athlon 3800+

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

when was the last time you opened it up and cleaned the shit of the heat skin on the processor or around the ram (or the graphics card fan for that matter?)

might be that this is causing overheating which could be causing problems.

Is the problem more pronounced when the machine first starts up or does it fade in as it were the longer it's left on or used?

 

[Dravinian]

when was the last time you opened it up and cleaned the shit of the heat skin on the processor or around the ram (or the graphics card fan for that matter?)

might be that this is causing overheating which could be causing problems.

Is the problem more pronounced when the machine first starts up or does it fade in as it were the longer it's left on or used?

If it was a problem when I turned it off, it is a problem when I turn it on.

If I do a restore point it lasts awhile before going skewiff.

Someone pointed out my windows installation was over 2 years old and that perhaps I might want to consider reinstalling windows, but I feel that is very defeatist.

eta yeah I been thinking about cleaning it for a few days. I might give that a shot now.

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

If it was a problem when I turned it off, it is a problem when I turn it on.

If I do a restore point it lasts awhile before going skewiff.

Someone pointed out my windows installation was over 2 years old and that perhaps I might want to consider reinstalling windows, but I feel that is very defeatist.

eta yeah I been thinking about cleaning it for a few days. I might give that a shot now.

does the problem go away if you leave it for a few hours turned off of doe sit not matter?

 

[Dravinian]

does the problem go away if you leave it for a few hours turned off of doe sit not matter?

It doesn't matter if it is off for awhile, problem persists when you start it up.

Also seems to be breaking down very rapidly from the restore point, by this I mean once I have done the restore point, it isn't long before it starts behaving like this again.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Speedfan and SMART monitoring been mentioned yet?

 

[Dravinian]

Speedfan and SMART monitoring been mentioned yet?

I am not sure I would know enough after getting them to know what to do with them, if you know what i mean.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Fair does.

Download:
http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php
Or to download directly: http://www.almico.com/speedfan435.exe

Install.

When it opens you should see a hint window, which you can read if you'd like but eventually once you close it you'll see the main screen. That contains loads of information about the speed of fans spinning and a list of temperatures, sometimes with helpful names telling you what they mean, sometimes. This is all good stuff, can help diagnose overheating and other trouble, but not vital for what i'm interested in this second.

Look along the top for the tab marked S.M.A.R.T. If you've got it turned on in your BIOS there should be a drop down list of your hard drives, if you select them then you should be able to do a health check on them. This is a way to check that your hard drive is not dying slowly of senility and a good indicator of hard drive health. Right now i can't give you detailed info as i've only just realised that i have SMART off, whoops!

Scrap that, all valid stuff but a total waste of time until we've checked one thing. RAM.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

How much RAM do you have in use right now, ctrl-alt-delete and hit performance, comit charge peak and currrent useage are the values we're interested in.

Also PIO needs to be checked, high CPU useage by random tasks could be down to your machine dropping into PIO instead of DMA. Classic warning signs are incredibly poor HD performance, high CPU useage, incredibly slow optical drive performance. Typically caused by hard drive communication trouble or more commonly scratched dvds / CDs. To see if this is a problem get into device manager and go down to hard drives, expand that tree and select IDE channel one (could be primary or any other name similar). Select properties and then select the "advanced" tab from what pops up, there should be some mention of either PIO or UDMA. This is from memory as i'm in vista.

 

[Dravinian]

How much RAM do you have in use right now, ctrl-alt-delete and hit performance, comit charge peak and currrent useage are the values we're interested in.

Also PIO needs to be checked, high CPU useage by random tasks could be down to your machine dropping into PIO instead of DMA. Classic warning signs are incredibly poor HD performance, high CPU useage, incredibly slow optical drive performance. Typically caused by hard drive communication trouble or more commonly scratched dvds / CDs. To see if this is a problem get into device manager and go down to hard drives, expand that tree and select IDE channel one (could be primary or any other name similar). Select properties and then select the "advanced" tab from what pops up, there should be some mention of either PIO or UDMA. This is from memory as i'm in vista.

Commit Charge (K)
Total: 419912
Limit: 2518488
Peak: 450156

Also along the bottom it has

Commit Charge: 373M/2459M

Primary IDE Channel Properties:
Device 0
Device Type (Greyed out) AutoDetection
Transfer Mode: DMA If available.
Current Transfer Mode: PIO Mode

Device 1
Device Type (Greyed out) AutoDetection
Transfer Mode: DMA if available.
Current Transfer Mode: Multi-Word DMA Mode 2

 

[Bob_the_lost]

AHA! I'm so fucking good it hurts some times. Normally when i point out how good i am and i get clocked in the head.

RAM wise you're fine, and happily enough it's a simple fix to get your computer working again. What's happened is that for some reason your computer has been getting trouble when transfering lumps of data around, normally it shuffles all the data directly from the optical drive to the hard drive, or to the PCI card or to the RAM or wherever (Direct Memory Access), however when things go wrong it tries to protect itself by routing it all through the CPU (Processor something something, not input output but that's how i think of it). This slows things down as CPUs aren't designed for that sort of use and aren't very good.

What you've got to do is uninstall the IDE channel, this is NOT dangerous in any way, i don't think you even need to reboot. To do this go to device manager, find the channel again and then right click and uninstall, it'll ask you if you're sure, you'll say yes and then you'll reboot just to be sure. Then go back in and see if it doesn't say "Multi-Word DMA Mode 2" for both devices.

Now, what cased this? Could still be the hard drive on the way out, still worth checking the SMART readout, or it could be bad luck, which it is in the vast vast majority of cases.

 

[Dravinian]

Oh Ultra DMA Mode 6 in effect now.

Gonna try a simple test that was completely knackering it earlier....test passed with flying colours.

Man of Genius I salute you.

Problem solved.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

That's good, the number after the UDMA represents the level if memory serves, higher is better.

I spent a while hanging around CDfreaks and PIO problems popped up pretty regulary there, they're normally caused by scratched CDs, whoever wrote that part of XP didn't think about real world consequences of their failsafe software coding nor did they think it would be worth warning the user in any way that they're about to cripple their machine. If you get the same problem again then it's definitely worth having a careful look at your hard drives, it is normaly optical drives but if it's hard drives at work then it's a very bad sign, and don't forget that now's a good time to check your backups.

 

[Dravinian]

That's good, the number after the UDMA represents the level if memory serves, higher is better.

I spent a while hanging around CDfreaks and PIO problems popped up pretty regulary there, they're normally caused by scratched CDs, whoever wrote that part of XP didn't think about real world consequences of their failsafe software coding nor did they think it would be worth warning the user in any way that they're about to cripple their machine. If you get the same problem again then it's definitely worth having a careful look at your hard drives, it is normaly optical drives but if it's hard drives at work then it's a very bad sign, and don't forget that now's a good time to check your backups.

You know I come across PIO once before, but it was so long ago I had forgotten all about it.

Thanks for the advice, been bugging me for literally days that has. Been like a bloody curse.

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

nicely done BtL

 

[Dravinian]

Ouch turned itself back to PIO.

I am not 100% but I think it happened when I ran a particular program. It is odd but PIO seems to be ok until you do something hectic, then it just fails totally, so I might not have noticed the change. Gonna try some tests.

Gonna get that SMART stuff and see if I can check the health of the drive, I have a spare if worst case scenario happens, but that would be bad.

 

[Dravinian]

I checked out the drive, seems to say it is healthy, everything has a Green sign by the side and Fitness and Performance of Drive, at the bottom, are both up there near their respective max.

Fitness 90% Performance 96%

This is set up as UDMA 6 again after I did another uninstall.

Gonna test a program that I think is responsible for sending my Harddrive to PIO.