Hi, I was here not long ago because of lag and things. I was working with someone over at the hijackthis. I thought my driver had died the last I posted over there, but someone fixed it at our local puter help office and said that there was a problem with a sector being recognized. (we also asked him to add 2gigs of ram)

Ok, now that I have it home I noticed that my cursor has been lagging every few seconds. Sometimes when I move the mouse the red light on my machine will blink and other times it won't. Also it won't always lag either.. it seems to happen on start up at times and then if I restart (after just starting up) it will be working fine. Its not just my mouse that seems to be lagging. I play world of warcraft and when my cursor lags the game also lags. But the game doesn't have to be running for this to be happening. At first I thought it could be a program that loads late or something starts running after awhile to cause the lag but I don't know how to find that out. Also, it could start lagging straight away or after an hour. I just don't know what to do. I have been searching online and found a few other people with the same thing but no real fixes. I would love your help. And would also like to ask if I could try changing my PIO to UDMA. I found an article about doing it after someone had tried this when their computer was having the same problems. It worked for them but wanted your input on it before I went ahead. Here is the link if you want to read it.

UDMA vs PIO - A CURE for the WinXP transfer mode failback "feature"

I'm running Windows xp Home Ed Version 2002 Service Pack 3
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+
1.99 GHz. 200 GB of RAM

Thanks for any help and let me know if you need more info.

Oh I almost forgot, I keep getting an error noise but no message. It doesn't happen all the time though.

Hey

Monitor your Task Manager under the Processes tab for a while.

When it lags your CPU usage will probably "spike".

See if you can pinpoint the process that is "spiking"


You can also check your Event Viewer:

Event Viewer
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Check your Event Viewer via Administrative Tools.

Open the System as well as Application tabs and look for red X errors that coincide with your problem. Details here:

How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP

Basic information on Event Viewer errors can be found here: EventID.Net


That UDMA/PIO page is rather outdated. These settings are fairly automatic with current hardware.

You can view your settings under Device Manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers

right click on a channel then properties then advanced settings

most will say Automatic > DMA if available.

Hi
I have been watching the processes for a few days and firefox goes to maybe 4-40
wuauclt goes to 13 at times. Is the system idle process supposed to stay in the 90's? Its been staying toward the 90-99. I was watching the performance too and when i just have firefox open its about 19-21% and when i move my mouse it spikes to 30% eww it just went to 50%
my cursor just goes ping ponging all over the screen.

Looking in the event manager I haven't had any errors since the 12th of this month. But I did hear the error sound when I was watching a video online. The errors that were on the 12th were application hang for firefox. On the first of jan i had a warning that windows saved registry while and application or service was still using the registry during log off.

for the PIO when I was reading that article it said that PIO isn't very good and that you can bypass all the problems by just telling it you want to only do the UDMA. I just didn't know if it was safe to do, or if it would help at all.

I forgot to say in my first post that when the computer guy fixed my hard drive, he also changed my start up things so that not everything was running in the background.



oops, forgot to say that my husband also plays the same game that I do on his computer but he isn't having the same problems with his cursor lag and.. i guess its also considered lag in the game.. the character will move and it will lag and then move again and stop again. Like it jerks or studders. He isn't having that problem though.

You should be running (U)DMA but as mentioned this should be automatic on current hardware.

It reverts to PIO only if your hardware does not support DMA.

What is this "error sound" you speak of? Can you elaborate?

System Idle Process is the cumulative inverse of CPU usage. If CPU usage is 1% then System Idle is 99% i.e. the system is idle.

Even with a browser open if you are doing nothing the idle should be 99%.

wuauclt is Automatic Updates from Windows.

Do you have the same problem using IE?

Do you have all Windows Updates?

Ohh i see ok.

The error sound is like.. an exclamation mark? Like a Dun! Its not a beep. does that help any? Its the sound I would usually get when I would get an error message only without the message.

Ohh ok, that makes sense about the idle.

I do have all the updates and I can't really get on IE much at all. It has to close a lot because of errors so I try not to use that at all unless I have to download something that is IE specific. I rarely have any problems with firefox. I had uninstalled both not long ago to make sure that my problems weren't from those also, but it didn't help.

If you don't mind can you describe what IE does?

It might be indicative of a more general computer problem.

Any errors it throws might be enlightening.

What do you mean you uninstalled IE? That is practically impossible to do as it is integrated into Windows.

Sorry for all the questions. Just digging for ideas.

If I try to load a page it will go really slow and so I'll try again with the same window and it will say error IE needs to close. So I'll send the error report and it will close. I'll bring up another page and it will do the same thing. At times it works fine for awhile but then it will do it again. I haven't used it for awhile. If I remember right I went to add and remove and clicked it. It uninstalled and then i went and reinstalled it thru firefox. I also did the same for firefox because at the time I was having problems with my firefox saying something like <insert site name>doesn't exist. and it wouldn't bring up the link. (i keep the links on my desktop for some places that are easier to go to.) Or other times I would get something saying that firefox is already running and not responding.. but I wouldn't have it open anymore. Seems like after the last update for firefox there were problems, but I had had the cursor problem before I got the updates I thought.

I didn't know it was almost impossible to uninstall it. No problem with the questions, I'm all for that, I been so frustrated all i can do is cry lol.

If you upgraded IE say from IE6 which is default XP to IE7 then IE7 would be removable.

Upon removing IE6 would be reinstalled automatically. IE6 would never appear in Add/Remove as it cannot be removed. It is totally integrated into the XP operating system.

When was the last time this computer worked well?

Your symptoms indicate issues beyond browsers.

Have you tried Google Chrome?

Google Chrome - Download a new browser

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On to possible help.


Try running Check Disk:

CHKDSK
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Try running Check Disk:

Go to start Run... and type: cmd

Then type: chkdsk /f

You will be told the volume is in use do you want to run chkdsk on next boot? Type: Y and reboot.

Oh ok, yeah it was IE 7.

Wow, the last time it worked well was maybe a few months ago. Maybe before christmas.
I was trying to find my last thread on hijackthis because I had done a chkdsk over there. The last one I did said I had a disk failure and it took over 8 hours to complete. I'm so scared to do another one. Should it really take 8 hours? But it should be ok since the computer guy fixed the sector right? and it shouldn't take so long since it was fixed?

I have not tried that one. I'll give it a go when we can maybe fix this *crosses fingers*

Who is the manufacturer of your hard drive?