Horrible, horrivle stuttering in general.

[The-King]

So yeah, as the title suggests I'm experiencing horrible bouts of stuttering after replacing a broken HD and doing a fresh, full install of Windows 7 Ultimate. During games that normally ran perfectly fine on my hardware I'll experience almost random FPS drops from a solid 35 or more to 1 to 5. The same thing happens when just running normal programs like Firefox, WMP and the like. The programs and Windows Explorer will randomly lock up and become incredibly stuttery, on and off.

 

I'm hoping this is just a Driver issue and not a Hardware problem. Since it's a fresh install, on a laptop, the drivers were a pain to install, and since they're designed for Vista I couldn't get all of the ones I needed so I'm unsure of whether I missed a few drivers, the drivers are conflicting with the OS, or something along those lines. Worst comes to worst it's a hardware issue and I'm strait up boned, since I had to scrape by in order to order this HD from Newegg.

 

The laptop is an Asus N83VB-X2

 

EDIT: I should also mention that I've been having a bunch of other booting problems and stability issues as well.

Edited July 29, 2010 by The-King

[OverTheBelow]

Perhaps the new HDD is a dodgy one? Try getting a replacement. Thats all I can think of at the moment.

[james227uk]

Reinstall Windows. I have installed a clean Windows 7, and it had errors straight away. I install it, and I had a load of stability issues and explorer.exe kept crashing. I reinstalled Windows and it fixed it.

 

So try a reinstall

[The-King]

Seems like the problem is directly related to my Sound Card/Drivers for it. I plugged in some headphones and haven't experienced any problems outside of games. The problem always seems to start when my music/sound starts skipping and repeating randomly which gets accompanied by the stuttering.

 

I've been having trouble with the card since I got my first HD replaced, so it makes sense that it's still that thing causing issues.

 

Outside of that it's not sleeping properly and the disk drive is being weird. It goes to the halfway point between sleep and not and just sits there, with the screen off but the rest of the hardware still spinning. I believe this problem might be related the the disk drive's problem. It'll start spinning and won't stop and won't allow me to eject it. I have to hard shut it down in order to get it to stop.

 

Any solutions, or ideas?

[cidamelo]

This is horrible, I'm experiencing problems with my HD too. Good luck for us both.

[OverTheBelow]

Outside of that it's not sleeping properly and the disk drive is being weird. It goes to the halfway point between sleep and not and just sits there, with the screen off but the rest of the hardware still spinning. I believe this problem might be related the the disk drive's problem. It'll start spinning and won't stop and won't allow me to eject it. I have to hard shut it down in order to get it to stop.

That happens to me too. I never really cared for it though since I never use sleep.

[luceberg]

Windows 7 already contains a lot of drivers, so you may not need to them. Only if something does not work would i install a driver. I have heard of issues with Realtek sound card drivers. Uninstall and use driversweeper in safe mode.

 

It could be a ram memory error. Run memtest and try reseating the modules and running one at a time.

[james227uk]

Or you could try reinstalling windows again like I said before. It may not have installed properly

[The-King]

 

Or you could try reinstalling windows again like I said before. It may not have installed properly

Yeah, I'm not doing that until it's my only option left, which it clearly isn't. I'm not going to go and do something stupid like that and risk losing everything/take the time to move my files over to a different partition when the OS has been stable since I quit using the integrated speakers and it's clear that all of the problems are all arising from sh*tty driver support.

 

The card is a Realtek. Is Driversweeper good? Every driver checking program I've used was some crappy limited trial version that didn't really do anything.

[luceberg]

Driversweeper is a proper free program with no crap attached, courtesy of Guru3D.

 

Uninstall the driver through programs and features, or device manager, then boot into safe mode and run driversweeper, choosing realtek drivers. Run it three times and then empty the recycle bin and reboot.

[james227uk]

This post is going slightly offtopic now, but you don't need to move your files if you reinstall Windows 7. It backs up pretty much everything to a folder called windows.old

[The-King]

So yeah, I assume that if I have two sound drivers running at once it's going to cause problems. Because when I installed my Nvidia drivers it automatically installed a sound driver and I already had the Realtek driver installed.

 

Just caught onto it.

[Tornado Rex]

So yeah, I assume that if I have two sound drivers running at once it's going to cause problems. Because when I installed my Nvidia drivers it automatically installed a sound driver and I already had the Realtek driver installed.

 

Just caught onto it.

Yeah, not a good idea

 

 

  This post is going slightly offtopic now, but you don't need to move your files if you reinstall Windows 7. It backs up pretty much everything to a folder called windows.old

Only if you do an "upgrade" install or whatever which is a horrible, horrible idea.

[The-King]

Hmm, uninstalled the Nvidia driver and the problem is still persisting. Every time I try to uninstall the Realtek driver I get this error.

 

 

Followed by this message.

 

 

I want to uninstall the Realtek driver and reinstall the Nvidia one and see that helps.

[PresidentKiller]

I have no idea about that error, but found some info for you:

 

http://club.myce.com/f7/realtek-ac97-audio...ghtmare-161731/

 

http://highdefinitionreviews.net/i-am-tryi...-an-error-code/

 

Hope it helps.

[james227uk]

Only if you do an "upgrade" install or whatever which is a horrible, horrible idea.

Nope, custom install also backs up to windows.old

[The-King]

Ok, now I'm starting to think the in-game stuttering might by a CPU/GPU issue. I get about a good minute of gameplay then I get a massive FPS drop from around 40/60 to around 4, which in some games lasts about twenty or so seconds then it goes back to normal for another minute or two, and it happens again, almost like clockwork (this occurred in Bioshock and Hitman games). In other games I'll start with a decent FPS of 25/60 which willll last a good minute or two then it will suddenly get cut down to 20 or less and make the game unplayable, mostly occurs in Source games as as well as Rainbow 6 Vegas.

 

EDIT: I should also add that my either one of my two cores seems to be idling at around 60C, during normal activity (music, internet browsing, etc) they work around 80C, during games they both go up to around 90C.

Edited August 2, 2010 by The-King

[Tornado Rex]

Ok, now I'm starting to think the in-game stuttering might by a CPU/GPU issue. I get about a good minute of gameplay then I get a massive FPS drop from around 40/60 to around 4, which in some games lasts about twenty or so seconds then it goes back to normal for another minute or two, and it happens again, almost like clockwork (this occurred in Bioshock and Hitman games). In other games I'll start with a decent FPS of 25/60 which willll last a good minute or two then it will suddenly get cut down to 20 or less and make the game unplayable, mostly occurs in Source games as as well as Rainbow 6 Vegas.

 

EDIT: I should also add that my either one of my two cores seems to be idling at around 60C, during normal activity (music, internet browsing, etc) they work around 80C, during games they both go up to around 90C.

Is your fan working? Is it fairly dust-free?

 

 

Nope, custom install also backs up to windows.old

How? You completely wipe the drive, how can it back anything up?

[james227uk]

I booted to my Windows 7 DVD, ran the Custom Install option, then it said it was going to back up my files to windows.old. Everything on the root of the C drive was still intact to.

 

Custom Install AFAIK doesn't wipe the drive, you do that yourself in the partition selection window of the install

 

EDIT:

 

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows...lling-Windows-7

 

Click on the 'Using the Custom installation option without formatting the hard disk' beneath 'Show All'

 

 

 

Sorry for this offtopicness

[Tornado Rex]

@james: Hmm did not know that. Good to know and thanks for the link. I'd still prefer to reformat but it's nice to know you can do a mostly "clean" install without totally wiping.

[The-King]

Just popped off the underside panel while it was running and the fan wasn't spinning and was caked with dust. Spun the fan a couple times with my screwdriver and it started spinning again.

 

Do I need to get a can of compressed air or are there other options. Could I use an air compressor for this or do I actually need to buy the compressed air?

 

EDIT: Seems like the fan was the problem. Soon as I got it spinning again I haven't experienced that stuttering yet. Everything's smooth as it used to be.

Edited August 3, 2010 by The-King

[Tornado Rex]

An air compressor should be fine, just make sure it's not blowing too hard so you don't dislodge anything. Good to know it was a simple fix

[The-King]

Yeah, as much as that stuttering pissed me off I'm glad it was doing that, since I assume it was the system's way of protecting itself from overheating and actually, physically damaging the hardware.

 

Probably some dog hair or something caught in the fan kept it from spinning properly.

 

Feels good being able to play games again.

[Tornado Rex]

Yeah, if you would have let it go much longer it probably would have shut itself off.