Sound skipping/stuttering

[whs]

I was just looking over your system specs again. It is a coincidence, but the system I am on right now is nearly the same as yours.

HP 6200 series
AMD 4800+
3GB of RAM
Windows7

I never encountered the sort of problems you are having - even when I ran Vista which came originally with this box in 2007. Maybe the 1GB additional RAM makes a difference.

Look at my hard fault histuiry in the picture - all zero. And as you have seen in my earlier Process Explorer clip - no DPC activity at all.

Now I think you are not suffering from an individual driver, but something more basic is wrong in your system. Try the following (and this is a long shot):

Go into Services and disable the Windows Driver Foundation (right click on it > go to Properties > there you will see). Then see what happens. Check whether the DPCs got better.

 

[roachcraft]

Sorry--what do you mean by "Go into Services"??

 

[richc46]

So to search and type services, you will see what WHS means.

 

[roachcraft]

No, that just brings me to "Easy Internet Services".

 

[richc46]

How do I... Disable services in Windows Vista? | TechRepublic

 

[roachcraft]

Gotcha, thanks richc46.

 

[richc46]

Your very welcome.
Follow instuctions by WHS and see what happens.

 

[roachcraft]

Sadly, disabling Windows Driver Foundation had no apparent effect.

I have to go to bed, will be back at this tomorrow. Thanks so much, and any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I just want to listen to music without interruptions, dammit!

 

[whs]

Thanks Rich for stepping in whilst I was on the other side.

Too bad we still did not make progress. Make sure you reenable the Driver Foundation. Another question: Do you have a USB stick connected to the system? Even better. Give us a list of all devices you have attached to the system.

Those high amounts of DPCs come from interrupts which the attached devices might produce. We now have to eliminate any source that can throw a monkey wrench into the system. Detaching everything from the system including the internet would be one test - just running with the bare bone system plus keyboard and mouse. If that yields a result, we can reattach the devices one by one to see when the problem occurs.

Let's discuss that tomorrow.

 

[roachcraft]

Good morning...

I disconnected everything but keyboard, mouse and monitor, but the DPCs kept tallying up. Here's what I have attached:

2 small Boston speakers + subwoofer
1 ancient HP PSC 500 printer
Scientific Atlanta cable modem
Linksys wireless router
Samsung 1.5 TB external hard drive

Do you want a list of everything in the Device Manager? Screenshots attached...

 

[roachcraft]

Hello?? Anybody out there??

 

[whs]

Sorry, I am late. This is really puzzling. So it is not an external device producing all those interrupts. Didn't you say that there were a lot of page faults (I do not even remember how one can see that in Vista). I am a bit at a loss because Vista does not have the same tools as Win7.

One thing though that would be useful is a map of your RAM. Run RamMap and post a snip of the initial page ( User Counts tab). Make sure you snip the whole page.

 

[roachcraft]

No worries, I'm just thankful someone is willing to make an effort. I found out about the hard page faults via LatencyMon, which is also how I found which drivers are related to the DPCs.

Here is the RamMap snip:

 

[whs]

Good picture. It shows a pretty normal usage of your RAM. Since there are 250GBs of free space plus available space (standby), there is no reason for normal page thrashing. But some programs create page faults even if there is available RAM.

So I guess we are back to the drivers. Which were the drivers that LatencyMon flagged as high DPC producers?

PS; sorry if I am not always around. But I make only occasional visits to the Vista forum. At this location, I do not have any Vista system any more. Only in NY and in Germany we still have a couple of Vista laptops that the wife uses.

 

[roachcraft]

RE: DPCs, I'm getting a ton of those from NDIS 6.0 wrapper driver, USBPORT.SYS, tcpip.sys, rdbss.sys, storport.sys, nvstor32.sys, dpclat_driver.sys, dxgkrnl.sys...those are the biggest offenders.

Also, ccsvchst.exe, crashplanservice.exe, explorer.exe and system are all causing tons of hard page defaults, according to LatencyMon.

I can give more examples if need be but those are the ones that tally the biggest numbers, as far as I can tell.

 

[whs]

Let me look at this tomorrow. Right now I have to leave for the day. I need some time to do some research on thoses processes. I only logged in to let you know that I did not abandon the problem.

Just a quick question right now: Did you install Crashplan Central or was that .exe generated automatically (e.g. by a code 42).

 

[roachcraft]

I installed crashplan; it's an online backup system I'm trying out.

 

[whs]

There is a possibility that Crashplan is constantly trying to make backups and kind of loops. The kind of processes you listed hint to that. For a test I would uninstall it - But use the free Revo uninstaller with the Advanced option (you will see when you launch the uninstall). Make sure you Select All and Delete all the remaining Reg entries and files in the second pass of Revo.

 

[roachcraft]

Thanks. Busy weekend, I won't be around to work on this, but I hope we can continue to troubleshoot when I get home?

 

[whs]

OK, take your time and try what I suggested.