Odd Occurence, please advise!

Grizzly_Addams

So I recently had my computer fail on me. Power supply first, Video Card second, and other parts are old and dying.

Before the power supply itself failed, I could alt+tab back and forth between desktop and WoW almost immediately. I replaced a few parts to keep the computer on "life support" and after doing so I can tab to my desktop, but when I tab back to WoW or another full screen application it takes some time (10 or so seconds) before the application actually renders.

I got new mobo, cpu, power supply, vid card and this is still happening. Only thing I can think of is video driver related since I updated them for the "life support" card I was using.

The Reverend Dr Galactus

Is all your RAM being recognized? Seems like a paging sort of thing.

Grizzly_Addams

The Reverend Dr Galactus wrote: »

Is all your RAM being recognized? Seems like a paging sort of thing.

Yes all of the RAM is being recognized. Though other performance aspects of my computer are slower as well. Booting into windows, opening some programs. I thought this may be an issue as well but it's hard to tell since I switched to Win7 during this massacre also!

I do NOT get any crashing or blue screens, not even periodically.

Mustachio Jones

Just to rule out a failing HDD, run a chkdsk.

This can be done either by going into the Properties panel for the hard drive, the Tools tab, then errorchecking. Or, from an administrator command prompt (winkey+R, "cmd" for fastest access), then just chkdsk.

chkdsk c: /f will fix the problems if they're encountered, but this won't run while booted into windows, since it manipulates system files that are already in use. You can schedule a chkdsk /f from the Properties panel, though.
Assuming that you haven't done this already, and that you don't know how to do it. I apologize if you do.


This shouldn't be the problem if you've got enough ram, since you shouldn't be paging to disk very often. The booting and opening of programs is what tips me off though, since there's generally a lot of HDD access going on during those times. A bad block can fuck with your boot-up and access times.

I'm currently dealing with a bad block problem right now on my mother's machine. Chkdsk /f ran for a good hour and a half on the 20.5gb drive; the machine was taking around 6 minutes from power on to being usable, and the other hardware isn't bad by any means.



edit:

Alternatively, you could give Event Viewer a looking at, as that'll report bad blocks when Windows encounters them. Could also give some insight into other possible problems as well.

Grizzly_Addams

Mustachio Jones wrote: »

Just to rule out a failing HDD, run a chkdsk.

This can be done either by going into the Properties panel for the hard drive, the Tools tab, then errorchecking. Or, from an administrator command prompt (winkey+R, "cmd" for fastest access), then just chkdsk.

chkdsk c: /f will fix the problems if they're encountered, but this won't run while booted into windows, since it manipulates system files that are already in use. You can schedule a chkdsk /f from the Properties panel, though.
Assuming that you haven't done this already, and that you don't know how to do it. I apologize if you do.


This shouldn't be the problem if you've got enough ram, since you shouldn't be paging to disk very often. The booting and opening of programs is what tips me off though, since there's generally a lot of HDD access going on during those times. A bad block can fuck with your boot-up and access times.

I'm currently dealing with a bad block problem right now on my mother's machine. Chkdsk /f ran for a good hour and a half on the 20.5gb drive; the machine was taking around 6 minutes from power on to being usable, and the other hardware isn't bad by any means.



edit:

Alternatively, you could give Event Viewer a looking at, as that'll report bad blocks when Windows encounters them. Could also give some insight into other possible problems as well.

Raiding ATM and will chkdsk when I'm done as well as check event viewer.

However, I've got 4gb or RAM so there's not much paging as you said, and also, OS is on a different HD from my installed programs.

Grizzly_Addams

So I ran memtest, two full passes on all 4 gigs, took about 3 hours and not one single error.

chkdsk /r on both drives that are swapping data. No bad sectors.

I tried to roll back my nvidia driver from 186 to 185 because that was also a change made around the time of the problem, but the rollback driver option is unavailable to me from device properties. Anyone got a link to that driver? Win7 64-bit.

bowen

It could just be the registry is old and bloated, something that usually requires Windows to be reloaded.

sushiboy

Is it a name brand PC? If so, some of them have diagnostics. I would do process of elimination on all the hardware I can. Pull out all but one stick of RAM and see if it still does it. If it does, take out that stick and put in another, and so on. If it still does it after that, chances are that it is not RAM. In my experience, I have found that, even if a component seems to be working properly, passes tests, etc, when you eliminate it from the computer, all the sudden the computer works fine. I dunno. Just my 2 cents. Also, Win7 is not final yet, so you cant expect perfection. Sometimes Windows just needs reinstalled but just make sure you back all your shiz up.