my computer is lagging bad and not sure why

I am having troubles with my computer suddenly getting super laggy. It seems to happen when I am transfering avi files from one drive to another (it seems to freeze in the middle of doing this and then after 5 or 10 minutes picks up where it left off) but not exclusively limited to this. It is affecting my internet usage, my music listening and movie watching. If I look at my performance monitor at the time, there does not show any high cpu or memory usage or draining while this is happening.
I have checked the temp of my cpu : 49c
I have cleaned my registery and defragged my hard drives.
I have made sure I have no spyware or malware.
I have made sure I do not have a virus.
I had windows do an extended ram test with 5 passes with no problems.
My drives all have a minimum of 30gb of free space.
This is fairly recent and I'm not sure why this is happening. I cannot pinpoint the date it started.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

goo2 said:

I am having troubles with my computer suddenly getting super laggy. It seems to happen when I am transfering avi files from one drive to another (it seems to freeze in the middle of doing this and then after 5 or 10 minutes picks up where it left off) but not exclusively limited to this. It is affecting my internet usage, my music listening and movie watching. If I look at my performance monitor at the time, there does not show any high cpu or memory usage or draining while this is happening.
I have checked the temp of my cpu : 49c
I have cleaned my registery and defragged my hard drives.
I have made sure I have no spyware or malware.
I have made sure I do not have a virus.
I had windows do an extended ram test with 5 passes with no problems.
My drives all have a minimum of 30gb of free space.
This is fairly recent and I'm not sure why this is happening. I cannot pinpoint the date it started.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Could be a driver or a network (ISP) problem. I woulf first run this latency checker.
DPC Latency Checker

I used the checker as suggested. It seems to spike every 5 seconds. I ran it while transfering a file. When it began and the transfer lagged again, it spiked huge to 5065. How does this help me solve my problem?

Thanx for the time to help me!

edit*Just hit 12313 (I think it was when the transfer picked up again). And now my file transfer is done.

So I'm still having this problem. It seems to be getting worse. It took me 45 minutes to transfer a 700mb avi file from one drive to another. It was also stopping my internet from being used. It just seems to freeze my system. I'm starting to lean towards a fresh install of windows. Any ideas?

Just a hunch, but maybe your harddisks were dropped from DMA mode and are operating in PIO mode now ("processor input/output"). This would explain the long time it take to copy files and the lagging/freezing.

In Device Manager, you can expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and then check each ATA channel to see whether devices are attached to it and whether DMA mode is enabled for them. Typically, CD/DVD drives will say Ultra-DMA mode 2 and harddisks Ultra-DMA mode 5 or 6.

Corazon said:

Just a hunch, but maybe your harddisks were dropped from DMA mode and are operating in PIO mode now ("processor input/output"). This would explain the long time it take to copy files and the lagging/freezing.

In Device Manager, you can expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and then check each ATA channel to see whether devices are attached to it and whether DMA mode is enabled for them. Typically, CD/DVD drives will say Ultra-DMA mode 2 and harddisks Ultra-DMA mode 5 or 6.

Thank you so much for your quick response. This is driving me nuts!!!

I have just checked. I have 2 serial ATA controllers. The first has my internal drive listed at port 0 and set to DMA mode. It also has my DVDrom listed at port 1 also set to DMA mode. The second controller has no devices attached.

Question: Should my external drive be listed here at all?

Hmm, I was hoping this would be the key to solving your issue - sorry it isn't.

No, your external harddisk is connected through USB, it has nothing to do with the internal IDE interface(s) (which could really be a SATA controller in "legacy" or "compatibility" mode, btw).

Thanx anyways!

Any other suggestions?

First, when you say "transferring files from one drive to another" what do you mean precisely, internal or external (usb) drives?

Second, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and tell us if you see high CPU usage when transferring big files.

If you have relatively big disks and a lot of small files, the indexing service might interfere a bit (I never found any improvement using it and have it disabled in all my boxes and drives). Try disabling the indexing service and see what you get.

Also, sometimes antivirus utilities insist to check big files (and avis) and this will certainly cause significant lag. You can detect if this is happening by a high CPU usage during the transfers. Disable AV file checking and see if you still get the same delays.

All of the above assume that your disks' health is 100% (meaning they have not started developing bad sectors) and that they are properly ventilated (not overheating). If any of these happens, it will surely cause these symptoms (because the disk will be busy relocating bad sectors or doing thermal recalibration respectively).

I remember that slow file transfers was the main bug of the early builds of Windows 7 (before RTM). If you search the Microsoft Knowledge Base you will find several hotfixes that have cured various similar bugs. Try them one by one and maybe you'll get lucky.

The Big Question is why this problem appears suddenly out of nowhere. Unfortunately there is no universal answer. Nobody knows what triggers the issue and sometimes even moving an external disk to a different USB port fixes the problem. I'm sure some more ideas will appear in this thread soon.