PC Stuttering mouse/audio/video lag

[remuze]

Since this morning when I turned on my pc I have been experiencing some strange issues and wondered if anyone had any advice or suggestions.

When moving the mouse around in a figure of eight with nothing open, every few seconds it skips for about 1/10th second. This is a brand new issue, but I was also having trouble with my wireless internet speed last night, for which I use a usb netgear wna1100 stick.

It seems my pc is dieing in some way but I'm unsure how to identify whats causing the problem as I don't have lots of spare bits to put in.

Things I've tried so far:
Checked mobo + graphics card temps, both ~40-50C idle.
Malware Bytes found nothing
Full AVG scan found nothing
SeaTools hard drive scan found nothing

This leaves me to suspect a hardware fault somewhere else.

My system specs:
Windows 7 64-Bit Home Edition
Sapphire Radeon 4870 2GB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+
Gigabyte M57SLI-S4
Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse

The stuttering is fairly random, but always present and it never goes for longer than about 10 seconds without doing it.

Any ideas? Dieing motherboard or HD? How can i tell without replacing them?

 

[solarmystic]

Hello remuze,

This may be a shot in the dark, but can you try downloading the program in the link below and posting a screenshot of it running after about a few minutes or so in your next reply:-

DPC Latency Checker

http://www.thesycon.de/dpclat/dpclat.exe

How to take a screenshot:-

How to Use the Snipping Tool in Vista - Vista Forums

How to upload the screenshot:-

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html

Thanks for your cooperation.

 

[remuze]

Thanks for your quick reply! Obviously something is misbehaving, which is strange as I haven't installed anything new recently so it could have been an automatic windows update or something? The program said to try turning things on and off so I might give that a pop? Bonus points to you for shot in the dark

 

[solarmystic]

Thanks for your quick reply! Obviously something is misbehaving, which is strange as I haven't installed anything new recently so it could have been an automatic windows update or something? The program said to try turning things on and off so I might give that a pop? Bonus points to you for shot in the dark

Hold on a tick remuze, I've got an incoming post with everything you need to do next... your patience is appreciated...

 

[solarmystic]

Hmm.. that is one disturbing looking graph full of red spikes!

A normal, healthy system would only ever have green spikes...

It's time for us to get up close and personal with what the exact problem might be using this nifty tool from Microsoft called the Windows Performance Toolkit:-

View attachment 221644 View attachment 221645 View attachment 221646

Download the attachments, unrar them using WinRAR/7zip/or your preferred file extractor, and run the installer.

When done, please prepare your system for the diagnosis by Disabling Paging Executive (needed for xperf to run with the stackwalk profile)

View attachment DisablePagingExecutive.reg

Double click the downloaded .reg file and click yes to allow it change that entry in your registry.





Next, open a command prompt with admin rights (type in cmd at your search bar, right click on cmd.exe and run as administrator)





Go to C:\temp (cd\temp) (make the folder if you do not have it) and run the following commands:

[I]xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile [/I]

(I use a different folder for mine but it doesn't matter where you run it from)



Now wait for some time (2 - 3 minutes) while the high DPC and Interrupt usage occurs.

To stop the trace run the following command:

[I]xperf -d DPC_Interrupt.etl [/I]

This closes the trace and writes the result to the file DPC_Interrupt.etl.

In the next step, make a double click the etl file (which would be in the C:\temp folder) to run the Viewer.

Now wait until the 2 passes are over.

Here's what the graphs looks like for example on my system (scroll down to see DPC CPU Utilization and Interrupt CPU Utilization)





Go to "Trace"(in the menu bar at the top) ->"Configure Symbol Paths" and type in the following:

[I]srv*C:\symbols*[URL]http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols[/URL] [/I]

Click OK, to close the dialog.





Now go to the graphs "DPC CPU Usage" or "Interrupt CPU Usage" (depending where your high CPU usage occurs) and select the interval, make a right click and select "Load Symbols" and next, click summary table.

Now, you will have to accept the license agreement to download the public debugging symbols.

(The PDBs can be massive, and it may take a while to download depending on your Internet connection)

Here you'll see summary of the calls..

Convert the etl files to uploadable txt files by using this command from the same location (C:\temp) where the DPC_Interrupt.etl file is stored.

Run it, and upload the txt file in your next reply please...

[I]xperf -I DPC_Interrupt.etl -a dpcisr > dpc.txt[/I]

Thanks for your patience!

 

[remuze]

The second xperf command take about 1 minute to finish executing and came back with this, the file it created was then empty (0KB).



Also I am on 64-bit windows and the .reg file you gave me said its type was 'Regedit file' and it wasnt assigned to regedit, i manually opened it with SysWOW64\regedit.exe, was this correct? It then asked me if I wanted to add it to the registry, but other posts suggest there may be a difference between 32-bit and 64-bit registrys?

 

[solarmystic]

The regedit file should be fine, it was built for 64bit registrys.. You were meant to import the file by double clicking on it to allow the entries to be added to the registry.

Hmm that's a very interesting error, which means that there's too many DPC Interrupts happening on your system that even the logging program could not deal with it, or you don't have enough space/RAM for the logger/tracer to cope with the amount of data.

How much free space do you have on C:?

Do you have another hard disk that's empty to run the commands on again?
(D: ?)

You could try to run the 1st xperf command again on C:\temp

xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile

but for a much shorter time (10-15 seconds), and then quickly type in the second xperf command

xperf -d DPC_Interrupt.etl

to stop the trace after that period of time...

 

[solarmystic]

If you want to be sure that the entry from that DisablePagingExecutive registry file applied properly to your Registry head to the registry itself and check the entry as shown in this following screenshot:-

 

[remuze]

I have about 2gigs free on my system partition out of 40GB and the rest of my 500GB HD is used for storage and games and i have atleast 300GB free, so I tried running it on the D drive instead.

It said the same thing about events being lost but did manage to capture something, the data file is about 27MB, I am currently downloading the symbols file (hopefully as the program has turned unresponsive ) Will upload the txt file in the next reply! Thanks for bearing with me!

 

[solarmystic]

Thanks for replying, and it's great to know some thing has been caught this time

Did you check out my follow up post regarding the registry entry?

 

[remuze]

Yeah i checked the registry and that was indeed set to 1 so thats all good. I can't convert the file into a txt file now, it just creates a 0KB empty txt file, something strange is going on? I can take a screenshot of the entire summary page instead?

The error I receive is xperf: warning: applying restriction of access for trace processing.

But it thinks it has executed properly?

 

[solarmystic]

Yeah i checked the registry and that was indeed set to 1 so thats all good. I can't convert the file into a txt file now, it just creates a 0KB empty txt file, something strange is going on? I can take a screenshot of the entire summary page instead?

The error I receive is xperf: warning: applying restriction of access for trace processing.

But it thinks it has executed properly?

You need to run that last xperf command in an elevated command prompt also

You can also take multiple screenshots of the summary page also if you wish.

 

[remuze]

Yep it says administrator top left and I opened another window just to make sure, it just isn't happy to do it

Heres a screenshot of the summary page, it fits into 1 nicely.

 

[solarmystic]

The biggest offender on that chart is nvstor.sys.

This is a sys file related to the functionality of the NVIDIA® nForce 570-SLIc chipset that is on your motherboard. (ergo the heart of your computer)

There are two ways we can deal with this problem:-

One, would be to procure updated drivers for the motherboard, and update the chipset drivers to see whether the issue would resolve itself.

Two, try moving your boot drive to the 1st SATA port on your board (If it isn't already there)

(and three, which is the one everybody dreads to hear... replace the motherboard as it may be going faulty...you did mention is only started happening very very recently...with no added devices or driver changes to your system right?)

To validate my hypothesis for option 3, try rebooting your system in Safe Mode and see whether the issue still occurs... if it does.. I'm sorry but it's the most viable option.

 

[remuze]

Its fixed Only trouble is, I am too lazy to open my pc up twice, so it could either be the amount of dust I removed from around the HD and front intake fan, the fact I swapped it from SATA 1 to SATA 2 or just disconnecting and reconnecting the cables. Ran a quick check using that xperf thing you told me about and DPC only reached 4% max during 1 minute, with the highest reading coming from USBPORT and nvstor about halfway down the list. Could have been overheating, as I only read GPU and CPU temps which both have their own fan. Thanks a bunch for helping me track it down to the HD, I'm one happy guy now +++rep.

 

[solarmystic]

Its fixed Only trouble is, I am too lazy to open my pc up twice, so it could either be the amount of dust I removed from around the HD and front intake fan, the fact I swapped it from SATA 1 to SATA 2 or just disconnecting and reconnecting the cables. Ran a quick check using that xperf thing you told me about and DPC only reached 4% max during 1 minute, with the highest reading coming from USBPORT and nvstor about halfway down the list. Could have been overheating, as I only read GPU and CPU temps which both have their own fan. Thanks a bunch for helping me track it down to the HD, I'm one happy guy now +++rep.

Wow.. so a simple SATA port swap settled it?
Thats great news!

Thanks for the feedback, I was wondering where you've been!

 

[ajo518]

im having the same problem here is the report Any help would be appreciated