Guest FrankyG Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 Hey, this is driving me nuts! Got Steam powered 1.6 on my new Drive, which is a 7200 rpm Western Digital with 8Mb Cache. Now, on my old drive, CS was flawless but now it stutters regularly sometimes for 2/3 seconds. It coincides with the HD light flashing but I can't figure what it's doing. I'm running OpenGL at 1024*768 16 bit colour. I was running with EAX and 32 Bit colour but trying to solve this problem I've cut things down to minimum. I've disabled indexing on XP, tried changing the system properties>performace to bias towards applications then to background services...didn't make a differece. My next move is to scour google to find the best video driver for CS and my ageing Geforce2 MX, and make sure DirectX is up to date. Was wondering though, is there any kind of util that can run in the background and monitor what the hard disk is doing, what's it's writing to etc...that might explain these slowdowns? Win XP PIII 900 512 Crucial Cas2 SDRAM Geforce2 MX 32Mb Thanks for any help with this one...
Guest spacemonkey Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 Is the hardrive connected to the same cable as a CD drive? if so, move it.... this may be the problem... or it may not.
Guest FrankyG Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 nope, master on its own channel.
Guest Stuart P Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 Try these FREE utilities - DiskMon and FileMon, from www.sysinternals.com Stu.
Guest muff Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 I'm guessing the new drive is something like UDMA133 - does your motherboard fully support the dataspeed of the new drive? oh the other thing is that if it's a new drive and you run XP it may have switched on drive caching/recovery thing automatically
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 Check you're using UDMA cables and not plain IDE's too (UDMA's have 2x as many individual cables)
Guest FrankyG Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 I'm guessing the new drive is something like UDMA133 - does your motherboard fully support the dataspeed of the new drive? oh the other thing is that if it's a new drive and you run XP it may have switched on drive caching/recovery thing automatically Yeah, the new drive is UDMA133 and the mobo supports that speed...but the data transfer rate is nowhere near that in practice, so that *shouldn't* matter... Actually, I'm having trouble activating the highest DMA mode for the new drive...think it's a VIA chipset issue. I wasn't too worried about it, for the reason I stated above about theoretical/real data transfer speeds. I'm thinking you're talking about the system recovery feature of XP? I've disabled that also. @Stu - thanks for the link. Edit - Mono, yeah it's the correct cable.
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted October 20, 2003 Report Posted October 20, 2003 Hmm, i remember my old flatmate having some issues with a UDMA133 drive and the DMA settings, and he also had a Via chipset. If i can contact him i'll ask and see what his problem was, and how he solved it.
Guest FrankyG Posted October 22, 2003 Report Posted October 22, 2003 Narrowed this problem down to one or two things; StyleXP service which was creating *very* frequent disk activity, and Zonealarm Pro's vsmon.exe service. I disabled all Zonealarm logging and this improved things, but the biggest improvement was by disabling the StyleXP service (created a profile). More investigations tonight, but it's looking good. :)
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