Periodic freezes in my system

cesm23 said:

thanks so much for the info to make me use this by myself too :)

No problem. I enjoy it :)

cesm23 said:

Ok i just remembered now, i ALREADY tried to disable or even close kaspersky completly in windows xp when i once tried to prevent the midnight freeze to happen, i think it STILL did the midnight freeze but the dropped frames reduced to half, i am not too sure since this was several months ago... I think it's because even tough kaspersky's main program will be closed, the drivers are still working at the background.

The driver is the "engine" of the AV solution. Those services and apps that are easily disabled and stopped by the user are just the configuration utilities. That is widely misunderstood. You don't have to go far to see examples of people argumentatively comparing the "resources used" by their favourite AV utilities, when in fact all they're doing is comparing the footprint of one pretty UI configuration utility against another... and completely missing the driver behemoth which does all the work.

That's why I mentioned that only a full uninstall of the AV utility is a reliable test of its involvement in any given problem - it's necessary to unsplice the driver from the I/O stack and to remove it completely. That's what an uninstall is meant to accomplish.

cesm23 said:

Anyway i am not sure anymore if we should go on with this anymore, the midnight freeze isn't much serious to me, specially if i would have to use another internet security suite instead of kaspersky, and since without it installed the hourly freezes still happen... i guess the only thing left to do, is making a clean install of windows 7 again, and make douzens of hourly traces, perhaps in a clean install there will be a lot less stuff to appear in the trace and like this perhaps it's easier to find the thing causing the hourly freezes.

Up to you of course. I still reckon it would be better to uninstall Kaspersky and to see what problems remain after that. I may be able to suggest more detailed and targeted logging for the smaller hourly issues, but I don't want to do that while there's this massive DPC thing staring us in the face.

Up to you of course. I still reckon it would be better to uninstall Kaspersky and to see what problems remain after that. I may be able to suggest more detailed and targeted logging for the smaller hourly issues, but I don't want to do that while there's this massive DPC thing staring us in the face.

That is the problem, i would have to post here without kaspersky installed, and i really don't like much being logged on the internet without a firewall and antivirus installed, and kaspersky is one of the few ones that work well here (besides the dpc problem). Unless you suggest me re-installing kaspersky just after the uninstall ?

Anyway didn't you said that in the hourly freezes is like finding a needle in a haystack ?

Also i have to tell you something : in fact i have TWO tv capture cards, one is a non-hardware encoding one, and the other is the ati tv wonder 650 which has hardware mpeg2 encoder. So the non-hardware encoder one is the one sensitive with the freezes, but the other one i already tested a tv capture during the midnight freeze and it was NOT affected at all by the freeze, it hasn't dropped a single frame, since it's encoding is done by hardware on the card itself. The problem is that the kind of tv captures i need to do in the non-hardware encoding card can't be done in the hardware encoding one, since the ati tv wonder only captures at 720x576 and audio encoded in ac3, and since i need some tv captures in AVI format with uncompressed audio that's why i need some specific tv captures in the non-hardware encoder card. And today, the entire day i need to do tv capture (using the hardware encoder one) so today i can't do big tests or traces, we will have to wait till tomorrow.

Please note that hardware encoder card i only got it back a few days ago and the freezes haven't changed anything so this extra capture card is also not part of the problem.

Let's wait for wednesday then for more tests.

cesm23 said:

.. Unless you suggest me re-installing kaspersky just after the uninstall ?

Sure, the only time you'd need to be without Kaspersky is for the purposes of the test at midnight. No reason not to put it back afterwards.

Actually, it would be useful if you could do the Xperf+dump thing again during that test, just in case (obviously, that set of logs only becomes relevant if the midnight freeze does occur even with Kaspersky uninstalled).

cesm23 said:

Anyway didn't you said that in the hourly freezes is like finding a needle in a haystack ?

A needle in a needlestack. Big difference. Needles in a haystack are easy - use a magnet

There are ways to be more focused and automated with this stuff, but to be honest I'm reluctant to go too far in that direction until the DPC issue is discounted. Always one problem at a time (the most severe and obvious), rather than multiple smaller concurrent overlapping investigations.

cesm23 said:

Also i have to tell you something : in fact i have TWO tv capture cards, one is a non-hardware encoding one, and the other is the ati tv wonder 650 which has hardware mpeg2 encoder. So the non-hardware encoder one is the one sensitive with the freezes, but the other one i already tested a tv capture during the midnight freeze and it was NOT affected at all by the freeze, it hasn't dropped a single frame, since it's encoding is done by hardware on the card itself.

OK. I know next to nothing about video but I'm guessing that these frames are precisely synced against the clock, so that the software encoder ends up simply dropping frames when it's unable to get the processor's attention - even for just a few milliseconds. Does that sound plausible?

cesm23 said:

Please note that hardware encoder card i only got it back a few days ago and the freezes haven't changed anything so this extra capture card is also not part of the problem.

OK, no problem.

ok. By the way i now notice i will have time about one hour before the midnight freeze i now can test this today. Tell me, is it better uninstalling kaspersky completly instead of just disabling it, right ?

cesm23 said:

ok. By the way i now notice i will have time about one hour before the midnight freeze i now can test this today. Tell me, is it better uninstalling kaspersky completly instead of just disabling it, right ?

right. disabling leaves the files on your system, uninstalling it gets rid of them.

ken

That was rather excellent, H2SO4. I couldn't believe he didn't wanna uninstall Kaspersky after your findings lol.

Cesm23, the Windows built-in firewall is excellent. You can use it instead with no worries. It even has outbound blocking if needed.

yeah but even when using p2p ? Well... i am still trying other commercial firewalls first, tough, and i still need a antivirus, i will try now only the antivirus part of kaspersky and see if the computer still gets that slow, since the major difference i notice was the speed when switching between opened windows, so this probably had something to do with kaspersky's firewall and probably not it's antivirus part. I want kaspersky purely because it's the ONLY one so far that hasn't had so many false positives when downloading stuff from p2p.

Ok H2SO4 i still need your review in the traces, when you can of course, now specially because the "main" problem remains, which is the hourly dropped frames. Meanwhile i still do as most hourly traces i can and see what i can find on my own, but in case it's really the problem of the driver delays, please advice on that.

That particular driver is part of the anti-virus. I have it on my system as part of Zone Alarm, which uses Kaspersky av.

Yes, the Windows firewall is excellent even when P2P or any other net use. I do advise a good antivirus though because P2P is a classic propagation source for malware. Even if you're careful, you could come across something using the networks.