Weird frequent stuttering problem on new laptop when playing games

[bootready]

A slowdown with RTC2?
How is that possible?
The game works independent from video and cpu performance.
This more or less excludes the video card/drivers.
Now I am at a loss, figuring something out via remote support.

I really would like to see your machine in person.

For now I do not see how the system slows down over time.
I know this is some leak in certain games (usually patched away over time).
The games slow down over playing time, but in your case your computer is slowing down over time.

Is it possible playing the game in a window?
Could you do that and open some tools (taskmanager/resourcemonitor, gpu-z etc.) to keep a little bit track of your slowdown?

I know there were some WINSAT issues.
WINSAT started itself while in a fullscreen application and slowed down the computer.
This also happened to me while in CSS... really annoying, the fix was easy.
You had to disable the WINSAT schedule entry and stop the process.

This is now the only thing coming to my mind.
A process/program taking a lot of HDD reading/writing resources.
This ultimately slows down every system.

 

[racie]

Haha. My computer certainly is a strange one.

Is WINSAT a process, service, something else, etc.? I can't seem to find it anywhere.

Well, I just let the slowdown happen twice. During both, there was no process that took more memory than usual and no process that took more CPU than usual (though I need to double check the CPU usage again). As for reading and writing to the HDD, dllhost.exe randomly started to have a lot of reading and writing to it when the first slowdown occurred. However, it did not do anything during the second slowdown and there was not a lot of reading or writing going on for any process.

I'm currently running Minecraft in windowed mode to cause the slowdowns and monitor the system.

*edit* Actually, it appears that audiodg.exe and perfmon.exe seem to use more CPU than normal during the issue. I'm not sure if others do this as well at the moment.

I also found this link which talks about the audiodg problem. However, movies run fine for me and all of my audio enhancements are unchecked.

 

[bootready]

Heya,

thanks for replying.

The perfmon.exe is the Resource Monitor application.
Of course it will eat up some resources, as you see it monitors your computers guts to ac certain degree.
The good thing is, it does that on demand, so only when you use and open the Resource Monitor.

The dllhost.exe has a lot of different tasks regarding dll management:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081030002731AATB5Z7

Nothing to worry about, taking in account how many dll's windows uses (and other applications of course too).

The sound issue is worrying.
I was forced to buy a soundcard with my old Asus P5B-PLUS mainboard.
The sound was stretched and I had a lot of performance peaks.
Either way the OS (XP at that time) or the drivers were the problem, I don't know.
Later on I switched to the onboard sound back (soundcard died), but it worked without problems, after I switched the OS (W7) finally.


Regarding WINSAT:

How to fix it: http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f217/winsat-exe-how-to-disable-398394.html

What it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_System_Assessment_Tool

 

[racie]

I'm apologize as I don't think I was being clear. The issue is not WINSAT. WINSAT does not run when this problem occurs. To be safe, I disabled it anyway after finding it in Task Scheduler thanks to your link. However, the issue still persists.

It's interesting that the total CPU usage shoots up to almost 100%, but I can't find one specific process that seems to be causing this. The memory and CPU usage of many tasks seems to elevate slightly, but I am failing to notice one single resource hog. Overall, Java takes up most of the CPU and memory that is being used because I am running Minecraft. I would expect any other game to take up more CPU and memory as well, but Minecraft is the only one I can run properly in windowed mode.

 

[racie]

Another update...

I sent my laptop off with my techie older brother for a little while, and he had no clue. After reinstalling all of my drivers and upgrading the firmware on the motherboard, the problem still persists. However, it seems to have gotten worse. Now, instead of about 20 minutes between each CPU spike, it is about 30 seconds. This applies to almost any game, not just Minecraft.

However, I noticed something quite strange. While most of my games have this horrible problem, a few run perfectly fine. Spore runs absolutely perfect on the highest settings. It's not my computer can't run the games I'm trying to play either. Portal is older than Spore and still has the CPU issues on the lowest settings. I have no idea why this issue happens for most, but not all games.

Do any of you happen to know where I can go for a solution to this problem? My laptop is still under warranty, but I don't know what to do. This issue only happens when playing certain games and I feel like I can't really take it to a professional place because they might not be able to reproduce the problem.

 

[racie]

Sorry for the huge bump. I am just recording this for anyone who is interested.

After a long break from the Sims 3, I decided to reinstall it and play it a bit. It didn't stutter at all, but a little while into the game it froze my entire computer unexpectedly. I stopped playing for the day and tried again today, only to find out that it keeps crashing. This may just be a Sims issue, but it is relatively new, so I don't think so. It's both concerning and frustrating that my expensive computer sucks so much.

My brother thinks it is my processor.

 

[Freedrinks]

Hello racie,
I know it has been a long time, and I don't know if you will see this, but I was searching in the internet for answers about what is happening to my pc and I happened to find your post which is the exact same problem I am facing with my pc. I have no clue about what is happening with it. A week ago I sent my laptop to a Toshiba store (my pc is toshiba), and now they sent me an email telling me it was software conflict and are charging me a lot for having just done a system restore as a solution. I will have to talk with them, but I just wanted to know if, after these years, you found any solution to the problems you were facing? Or bought another pc?
Have a great day

 

[racie]

Hello racie,
I know it has been a long time, and I don't know if you will see this, but I was searching in the internet for answers about what is happening to my pc and I happened to find your post which is the exact same problem I am facing with my pc. I have no clue about what is happening with it. A week ago I sent my laptop to a Toshiba store (my pc is toshiba), and now they sent me an email telling me it was software conflict and are charging me a lot for having just done a system restore as a solution. I will have to talk with them, but I just wanted to know if, after these years, you found any solution to the problems you were facing? Or bought another pc?
Have a great day

Well this is certainly an extreme blast from the past. I'm sorry I never noticed this post when it happened (and also apologies for the mods if they don't like the necro!).

Unfortunately, the problem was never resolved. I had the laptop sent out to HP support (under warranty, so no fees for me). Since the problem was always intermittent (nothing to immediately trigger it), I got it back and it seemed to be working ok at first. However, the problem persisted and was unfortunately never resolved. I have no idea what caused it, but I unfortunately had to give up playing games on my laptop.

It was a bit of a shame really. The laptop was very expensive when it was purchased and it was never able to be fully utilized.

----

I will say that for anyone having this type of issue, I could never pinpoint it, but I did tend to notice patterns if it helps.

- The issue was almost always with games with 3D acceleration. I thought it was only an issue with 3D graphics until reading this thread again actually. = Possibly related to the AMD card?

- A factory reset would almost always cause the system to be in worse shape than after I had reinstalled everything. = Possible driver issue?

- Linux OSes have always ran infinitely better than Win7/10. (I played Minecraft for some time the other day with the occasional slowdown, but no unusable lockups combined with audio distortion.) = Possible Windows related issues specifically?

- The laptop gets almost burning hot to the touch but has never powered off due to overheating (I found this rather odd considering other systems I've had tend to power off when too hot). = Possible odd heat-related scenario?

----

I doubt you're reading this and I bet you've long forgotten about your issue, but I just wanted to give an update since one was requested.

Though I gave up the hope of using games on the laptop, it actually is running to this day (though it's still hot af; thinking of attempting yet another cooling solution). I dual boot Linux Mint (works terrific on it and is my main system) and Windows 10 (runs rather poorly, but done for program compatibility). Not terrible considering my previous laptop didn't make it to 3 years.

Best of luck to all of you out there with intermittent computer problems of unclear origin.