Games freeze up every 4-5 seconds

[RTW]

A few days ago, my games started to freeze up.
I am able to play them fine for about 2-3 minutes and then they will freeze up for 4-5 seconds, then unfreeze for 4-5 seconds and repeat. I thought this was just for World of Warcraft, but I tried it with Counterstrike and I was getting the same problem. I even ran Supreme Commander in campaign mode and it gave me the same problem as well.
All of my drivers are up to date, and I even dusted out my tower.
This is a recent problem and I have been looking around for answers, none of the other forum threads seemed to get me to my problem, so I decided to post this thread in search of answers to my problem.
Thanks for your time.

Power Supply: Antec, TruePower 2.0, 550 watt, EPS 12
Motherboard: ASUS, A8R32-MVP Deluxe, Socket 939
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 939, 3000 MHz
RAM: Corsair, DDR2, 2x512 MB, 400 MHz each
Video Card: Radeon, X1300/X1550 Series, PCI-Express, 256 MB, Crossfire
Hard Drives: Maxtor, IDE SATA, 122 Gb
Maxtor, IDE SATA, 122 Gb
Seagate, IDE SATA, 250 Gb
OS: Windows XP Professional

 

[Demos_sav]

Is your processor or video card overclocked? If they are get them back to normal and try again

 

[theonetruewill]

Is your processor or video card overclocked? If they are get them back to normal and try again

Look at his processor speed. A 4200 X2 @3Ghz

 

[Demos_sav]

Look at his processor speed. A 4200 X2 @3Ghz

Sorry I ain't good with AMD processors..I never had one. I don't know if that is overclocked or not. I thought it is because I think AMD 6000 work at 3GHz

 

[RTW]

Yeah, it's not overclocked.

 

[Kreij]

It could be that something is running in the background and eating up CPU cycles (thus causing the slow downs). Try killing any processes that you don't need to play the games and see if that helps.

If it does, you will have to figure out which one is the rogue process.

 

[Demos_sav]

Yeah, it's not overclocked.

Correct me if I am wrong but I just found a link that sais the 4200 is clocked at 2.2GHz. Are you sure it isn't overclocked?(by 0.8GHz?)

 

[RTW]

Correct me if I am wrong but I just found a link that sais the 4200 is clocked at 2.2GHz. Are you sure it isn't overclocked?(by 0.8GHz?)

That's what my system says it's at, but when I ran it through a diagnostic program it gave me 3.0 GHz.
I have not messed with a single thing to make it overclocked.

 

[Demos_sav]

That's what my system says it's at, but when I ran it through a diagnostic program it game me 3.0 GHz.
I have not messed with a single thing to make it overclocked.

Post a screenshot of cpu-z in idle and load

http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpu-z-140.zip

 

[theonetruewill]

What diagnositc program did you use: and do what demos says.

 

[Demos_sav]

What diagnositc program did you use: and do what demos says.

Don't be so sure it's the program faults.... My friend had a mobo that automatically adjusted the cpu speed by load

 

[RTW]

This what you mean?

 

[Darknova]

Yup, that's what he meant...and as you can see it is running at 2.2Ghz, so that other program was reading the CPU speed wrong.

I had this problem recently, and for me atleast, it was a problem with hard drive caching. What you need to do is a thorough chkdisk, as well as a full defrag (might have to do it upwards of 5 times to be sure). Also you might want to delete your pagefile, and put it on another drive (preferably one that's not used all that often).

 

[newconroer]

Er, hold off on moving the pagefile. You can delete it and make a fresh one, but moving it elsewhere isn't necessary.


RTW have you made any system related changes since?

Unless he's had a sort of system corruption, it shouldn't just up and start crashing him.

Did anyone even mention a possible virus/virii?

 

[Darknova]

Er, hold off on moving the pagefile. You can delete it and make a fresh one, but moving it elsewhere isn't necessary.


RTW have you made any system related changes since?

Unless he's had a sort of system corruption, it shouldn't just up and start crashing him.

Did anyone even mention a possible virus/virii?

That's what I was pointing at. The MFT table on my HDD had corrupted and that was causing the problem. He never said it was crashing, but freezing up for a few seconds then it would work again for a bit, then freeze again, exactly what I had.

Also, moving the pagefile to another drive so it's not the main drive, increase performance as it decreases read and write times.

And no, I never thought about a virus to be honest

RTW, you might want to do a full system scan, and get a copy of Spybot and Adaware and do full scans with those as well.

 

[newconroer]

Increase performance? Hardly. If you manually move your data to the physical end tracks of your drive, then you can place the page file wherever you like in regards to the other data that's near those outer tracks(usually right behind the MFT). A contigous page file is easily reached and read. The only place you'd see a performance difference is in a synthetic benchmark program, not in your applications.

I just noticed that he said they'll unfreeze. Well that actually might help diagnose it a bit easier.

But until we know whether he changed anything, it'll be a crap shoot.

 

[RTW]

The only system related changes that I did was update all my drivers. But the problem didn't happen till a day later. I had thought that the updated drivers might have been the case, but I rolled them all back and it didn't fix anything.

I ran Ad-aware yesterday, and I just ran Spybot.

I'm going to restart my comp now and have it run chkdisk and then I will proceed to defrag it a few times.

Also, where would the pagefile be located?

 

[newconroer]

If you mean to remove it:

START>Run:

Regedit

Find: "clearpagefile"

It may return an entry that's not what you're looking for. Continue to "find next" until you find the entry:

"ClearPageFileAtShutdown REG_DWORD 0X00000000"

You'll want to double click on it and change the "value data" to "1"

Now continue to "find next" and repeat the process of entering "1" value for any entries of ClearPageFileAtShutdown.

Then reboot. Your system will take a while before it restarts, and when it starts Windows again, it will be slower than normal.

After this, return to the Regedit, and do the same process as above, but return the values to "0"

Then reboot and you're done.
If you want to properly defrag the drive, use Ultimate Defrag.


The simple assumption would be as mentioned above, that something is using up clock cycles and /or attempting to seek data on your drive.
Could you give us a Hijack and Process list screenshot(run a game where this freezing happens, then Alt-Tab and then take the screens).

 

[kwchang007]

How do your temps look? Have you changed your gfx settings in the games? Also, have you forced AA in CCC?

 

[RTW]

So far I have run chkdisk.. (Had to go do some groceries, so it was finished by the time I was back)

I downloaded the Ultimate Defrag, and I started the defraging of my main drive but stopped it because it went to what seemed would be 24 hours of defraging?!
I think I'll try the normal defragging with windows.
After defragging I will do the pagefile thing you suggested.

Here is the Process, Hijack I think you were talking about?

How do your temps look? Have you changed your gfx settings in the games? Also, have you forced AA in CCC?

Temps seem ok. I haven't messed with gfx or Anti-Aliasing.

Temp1: 41C
Temp2: 35C
Temp3: -128C
HD0: 36C
HD1: 37C
HD2: 38C
Core: 41-42C

Vcore1: 1.39V
Vcore2: 3.30V
+3.3V: 1.98V-3.03V
+5V: 5.00V
+12V: 12.16V

 

[newconroer]

First, you have to really read and learn the Ultimate Defrag manual/help guide. If you don't it's useless to you.

The defrag on most people's systems, moving the data to the outer tracks will take about one or two hours, then you do it once more after that. As I said, READ.

Normal windows defrag won't do anything for you.
And you need to remove the page file first usually, but if not using Ultimate than bleh nvm.

Second, that's not Hijack or the Processes.

Thats WOW and CPUZ

 

[RTW]

Second, that's not Hijack or the Processes.

Thats WOW and CPUZ

Oh, lol, then what is Hijack and Processes? Are they programs that I need to download?

Is the processes the processes in Task Manager (that's my guess), but I've never heard of Hijack.

I'll read through the Ultimate Defrag manual.... it's just that I have been for the past couple of days with doing a lot of stuff on my comp and nothing has been improving.
But I am up for anything to get it working again.

 

[RTW]

Ok, I read most of the vital parts of the manual, I'll do the pagefile first and then i'll start the Ultimate Defrag like you suggested.

 

[RTW]

If you mean to remove it:

START>Run:

Regedit

Find: "clearpagefile"

It may return an entry that's not what you're looking for. Continue to "find next" until you find the entry:

"ClearPageFileAtShutdown REG_DWORD 0X00000000"

You'll want to double click on it and change the "value data" to "1"

Now continue to "find next" and repeat the process of entering "1" value for any entries of ClearPageFileAtShutdown.

Then reboot. Your system will take a while before it restarts, and when it starts Windows again, it will be slower than normal.

After this, return to the Regedit, and do the same process as above, but return the values to "0"

Then reboot and you're done.

I did as you said, from 1, restarting, then back to 0 and restarting.

Is it odd that it didn't "take a while before it restarts, and when it starts Windows again, it will be slower than normal"?
Because it didn't take any longer than usual to start up both ways and my computer wasn't any slower when switching back to 0.

 

[RTW]

Alright, well, I have ran dskcheck, done the clearpagefile thing, and the Ultimate Defrag.
I restarted, and I ran WoW. After a few minutes, like before it started doing the freeze, unfreeze thing.

Anyone have any other clue as to why I am having this problem and a solution to fix it.

Not sure if it matters, but I get a about 100 more ping rate with WoW than I used to, thought Counterstike still gives me the same ping as before this big mess of freezing and unfreezing.