Jerky windows and scandisk problem

[sykophreak]

Hi. I've got a customer that has recently had his CPU, motherboard, and hard drive upgraded. He does a lot of sound editing for his music business, and has recently started having troubles with the sound being jittery. When this happens, his mouse also starts responding slowly. I installed the via 4-in-1 updates yesterday to correct a IRQ Routing issue he had. I know that jittery response usually indicates an overloaded CPU, so I've told him to turn off all of the stuff running in his systray. I haven't heard whether that's helped or not. I believe he has enough power to do what he's doing, though, without having to shut everything else down.
Also, he's complaining about Scandisk locking up Windows when he tries to run it. It locks up when it gets to the initializing phase. I've seen this recently on two other machines, one which an upgrade to 98 Second Edition fixed. I have tested the RAM, with no problems found. Any thoughts or suggests are appreciated. Here's the stats of his machine:

AMD K6/2-550
Soyo SY-5EH5 Motherboard
2 64MB PC-100 totaling 128MB RAM
10GB and 15GB Hard drives
Sound Blaster Live w/ 5 1/4 bay module
Netgear FA310TX PCI NIC
Trident 9440 PCI Video Card
50X Delta CDROM
HP CDWriter 8100
Windows 98SE

Thanks in advance!!

[DocPC]

Try running scandisk in safe mode.

[sykophreak]

Running Scandisk in safe mode is an option, but it still doesn't fix the problem. I try to keep the customer from having to call me because they're computer locked up.
The problem with scandisk is not the more pressing problem, though. Still need ideas on fixing the jittery OS.
Thanks, though!

[DocPC]

Does he/she have the auto-update enabled for the SB Live Platinum? Or maybe the sound file/files are corrupted. What sounds/when?

[sykophreak]

I've instructed him to download the Liveware 3.0, but I don't think it's been done yet. He records music from CDs, MIDI, a cassette deck, and other equipment for his customers. Therefore, if a CD or tape he's recording from is recording with jitters and pops and pauses, the customer isn't happy. Creative tech support thought that the problem was with his IRQ Routing, but as I said before, that was fixed by updating his VIA files.
He called me back earlier saying that he had shut down everything in the systray, but the problem still existed. Albeit it was a little better, but still too noticable.
If you need to know anything else, please feel free to ask.

[weazel]

i recently had a similiar problem with sound on my system after upgrading my harddrive
you may want to make sure that DMI is enabled on the harddrive...basically the harddrive was using alot of cpu power...once DMI was enabled my problem was resolved...
try uninstalling the bus mastering drivers
check the FAQs at the soyousa.com website...i'm pretty sure i saw it there somewhere.

[pga]

did you try deleting the contents of the "C:\WINDOWS\APPLOG" directory?

[sykophreak]

I'll try the DMI and busmastering ideas today, if and when I can get over to his office.
No, I haven't deleted the C:\windows\applog directory. Never had to do that before, what's in it, and what does deleting it effect?

Keep the ideas rolling! :-)

[Ruslan]

Originally posted by sykophreak:
Here's the stats of his machine:

AMD K6/2-550
Soyo SY-5EH5 Motherboard
2 64MB PC-100 totaling 128MB RAM
10GB and 15GB Hard drives
Sound Blaster Live w/ 5 1/4 bay module
Netgear FA310TX PCI NIC
Trident 9440 PCI Video Card
50X Delta CDROM
HP CDWriter 8100
Windows 98SE

Thanks in advance!!

Just a suggestion:
Try to replace video card. I have seen so many problems caused by exactly this old Trident 9440 card.


[This message has been edited by Ruslan (edited November 02, 2000).]

[Shard92]

I agree with Ruslan, I have had many problems with 9440 especially if direct x is installed. Some cards and systems seem to work and others don't. Must be minor confict with certain combinations of hardware.

GLSmith

[ledrichard]

just quick thought. Has he been able to try with different cdr's ?

I had same problem with imation cdrs while using an Acer CDRW. I changed to yamaha and sony and everything to work fine. Had similar problems with several HP CDRWS as well.

Wouldn't it be possible to determine if there is an IRQ issue simply be removing all other cards and/or disabling them?

is there a way that you can try with a test HDD with another OS build to determine if there is a problem with the OS or the Actual HDD? Maybe the HDD is not transfering data fast enough.

How much space is left on the HDD?

[sykophreak]

Ok.. I haven't gotten to get over there yet today (too busy), here's the answers to some of your questions.

He still has plenty of room left on both hard drives. He's not just pulling sound off of the CD drives, either, so I don't think it's a problem with the drives. The hard drives he has are 10GB 5400rpm and a 15GB 7200rpm.
I'm afraid I don't have a large enough drive available right now to try him on a different drive to see if that would fix it.

As for the video card, I'll have to see. I've never really had trouble with those cards, but the ones I do have are getting old, so they could get flaky.

Speaking of the scandisk issue, I just had it happen on a totally different machine. This is now 4 systems doing this within a month's time. Any ideas?

[sykophreak]

Ok, I've got a few changes to make to the stats I had listed above. I just found out that some of the things I had listed were told to me incorrectly.

**AOpen SIS 6326 4MB video instead of Trident 9440
**AMD K6/2-500MHz instead of 550MHz
**6.4GB instead of 10GB
**24X CDROM instead of 50X

That will teach me never to rely on someone else's paperwork... :-)

Sorry for the mis-information guys... please keep the ideas coming.

[sykophreak]

Just to update you,
The customer called saying that he shut down most of the programs in the systray, and that the computer is acting better. It does still have some stuttering problems occasionally.