Hi
I just wanted to share this information, maybe it can help others which have experinced similar symptons and problems as I have. One of the problems I have had with stuttering playback, was that just once in a while after coming out of standby (I think) something unknown would happen which would cause periodic stutters (with about 2sec period) when watching tv, movies or generally accessing the disk. I tried everything from repairing the disk with checkdisk tools guessing it was a disk failure, to looking at the system statistics with process explorer from sysinternals which showed excessive load on the hardware interrupts. Nothing helped and I had to reinstall windows+everything else. This has happened 4-5 times now, and I was just about to give, install linux and put mythtv on the box, when I stumbled across these three sources: Tutorials-Win.com >> XP Hardware >> High CPU usage for hardware interrupts - Microsoft Windows Forum
DMA reverts to PIO | Windows Problem Solver
IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur
The problem was (drums please!) that windows in its infinite wisdom reverted my disk from UDMA-6 to PIO because of multiple timeouts accessing the disk. This regression was not temporary, as the PIO is set as THE mode for the disk for all time hereafter. The mode for the disk can be seen in the device manager for the ide channel in question.
One of the solutions as I read in the above source, was to remove the ide channel and then restart. Upon bootup windows would rediscover the ide channel and renegotiate the mode for the disk, and voilá I had UDMA-6 back again.
best regards
Martin
I just wanted to share this information, maybe it can help others which have experinced similar symptons and problems as I have. One of the problems I have had with stuttering playback, was that just once in a while after coming out of standby (I think) something unknown would happen which would cause periodic stutters (with about 2sec period) when watching tv, movies or generally accessing the disk. I tried everything from repairing the disk with checkdisk tools guessing it was a disk failure, to looking at the system statistics with process explorer from sysinternals which showed excessive load on the hardware interrupts. Nothing helped and I had to reinstall windows+everything else. This has happened 4-5 times now, and I was just about to give, install linux and put mythtv on the box, when I stumbled across these three sources: Tutorials-Win.com >> XP Hardware >> High CPU usage for hardware interrupts - Microsoft Windows Forum
DMA reverts to PIO | Windows Problem Solver
IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur
The problem was (drums please!) that windows in its infinite wisdom reverted my disk from UDMA-6 to PIO because of multiple timeouts accessing the disk. This regression was not temporary, as the PIO is set as THE mode for the disk for all time hereafter. The mode for the disk can be seen in the device manager for the ide channel in question.
One of the solutions as I read in the above source, was to remove the ide channel and then restart. Upon bootup windows would rediscover the ide channel and renegotiate the mode for the disk, and voilá I had UDMA-6 back again.
best regards
Martin