Stutter & Drivers

batrot · 13 Jun 2012

Looking for ways to solve stuttering while listening to streaming audio, discovered that when stuttering occurred, System CPU usage was above 20%. At 20 or below, no stutter, although DPC Latency Checker might show latency around 150-200.

Checked all drivers, etc, as suggested by DPC info box.

Finally, tried stopping all services related to WD. Western Digital's file management software seems to be the problem. I did stop every one of them and have had not stutter for approaching half an hour. Stuttering was occurring every minute or so, lasting a moment, or several.

This may not be the only problem, but so far so good, and I hope it helps.

batrot · 13 Jun 2012

Mark this up to wishful thinking. All of a sudden, the stuttering returned, even though latency doesn't usually show figures above 200.

I guess the driver problem is somewhere else--NOT WD Smartware.

Sorry. If anyone else comes up with a solution, I'd love to hear it, instead of the stinking stuttering.

EDIT: Still, as the System (NT Kernel & System) process hits 20 and goes up, usually to 25%, the stutter hits.

FURTHER OBSERVATION SHOWS THAT WD SMARTWARE restarted itself. I am changing it to manual start, and will report back.

Any ideas on this?

DeaconFrost · 13 Jun 2012

The first thing I did with my WD external drive was to kill off Smartware.

batrot · 13 Jun 2012

When I first used it, under Vista, it worked fine. If it's the program I think was working, it would keep my files updated with every change, without my needing to do anything. I have docs I work on nearly every day and lots of changes. Most of the files are important, so keeping the latest changes would be helpful in recovering lost data in case of a HDD failure. I also found when I looked at removing WD Smartware that there were two versions in the installed programs list. I have now removed them and will try putting just one back to work to see if that will work properly. What issues did you have with the pgm?

DeaconFrost · 14 Jun 2012

It married itself to the drive and ran all the time, and was difficult to remove. I prefer to have a choice in how I manage my data. I also didn't appreciate the partitioning and virtual drives it created.

If I wanted to keep my data backed up to an external drive, I'd just use SyncToy. For documents, though, I'd prefer something "in the cloud" like SkyDrive or Google Drive.