System Problems

[Rockenstein]

Dell Inspiron Laptop
300megahertz
96 megs RAM

Hey guys,

I'm back to my favorite tech support forum for some help!
I recently reinstalled my laptop with Windows 98. I still had the disk with all of the drivers for audio, video, modem, etc. After I reinstalled, I installed the new directX 8.1 and Explorer 6. This is the same way this laptop had been setup before, with the exception of the new DirectX. Then the problems started occurring. When playing D2, or even just playing mp3s, I get stuttering in video and audio and sometimes skipping. I reinstalled again and left out the directX, and it still occurred. It starts right at the startup sound, which stutters.
I ran System Monitor on it, and it spikes out quite a bit. I have just system stuff running in the background - nothing unnecessary. When I start Media player, it spikes up to 100% CPU usage, and then goes back down, and then will sometimes come back up to between 50% and 70% CPU usage, which is an awful lot for just a player. Am I missing something? Any ideas why my processor is working so hard?

TIA
Rockenstein

p.s. I went to Dell's site and got the most recent drivers they had listed for my hardware. This did not help either.

 

[Magickian]

could be a few things. First off, if you have the new media player, that piece of crap is a memory hog and I suggest going down to 6.2. You may also want to leave off IE6, I'm not sure if that version integrates itself into the OS or not (if it does, it may be taking up more memory and cpu cycles). If those aren't the cases, there may be one problem that's causing it if it's an older and well used laptop. Generally when a hard drive starts going and it's trying to be read from, everything goes into a waiting state and the cpu just loops until it reads the data. I've never had this happen with laptops, but with PC's you will hear the hard drive spin up/spin down/spin up/spin down, then it'll usually make a beeping noise (it's funny when you take one apart and watch it do that, it's like one of those strength carnival games where you have the hammer and the bell).
You may want to try turning the sound off of the laptop and play a movie file and listen closely to your laptop to see if you hear that noise.

 

[Rockenstein]

I've been thinking about a possible harddrive problem. Are there any utilities to better check this? I ran a full scandisk and came back clean.
I did try going back to the old media player, I forgot to mention it. It seemed to lessen the problem, but it was still there. I was still running Explorer 6, but since I was running this before I reinstalled, I doubt it is my problem.

One other thing I failed to mention, which is probably the most important thing I could have left off: I broke my LCD recently, but it was a direct hit to the screen, and not the laptop itself. I am currently using an external monitor with it. Could this cause any problems? I find it highly unlikely, but thought I would mention it. There is always the possibility that I jarred something inside the laptop, but at this point I'm not sure which way to look.

My big question is still why the CPU usage is maxing out. Would a read problem with a harddrive cause this? Or maybe, I was thinking, RAM gone bad?

I guess my next step is to try a third reinstall, and this time test my issues before I do any upgrades, and with a minimal amount of drivers. It is possible that Dell does not have the most current drivers for my hardware on their site, since it is an older laptop. I would greatly appreciate some links to anyone's favorite driver sites

Rockenstein

 

[Magickian]

A read problem will cause everything to halt on a one processor system because the CPU has to wait for the device to talk back with it.

This can be seen in older high speed cd-roms. You'd put a cd in, double click on it, your cd-rom drive would then go "vrrrrrrrooooooooommm" (which is it speeding itself up) and everything would be paused until the cd is actually read. The same holds true for hard drives, but since they are rarely inactive (except for when you set the hard drive to go into low power mode) you never notice this.

If a hard drive is going bad, it will keep the CPU waiting until either it has successfully read the data, or it was unable to read the data after X number of tries. When it fails to read X number of times, it is generally either a bad sector on the disk, or one of the drives mechanics are going out (like the head, or the arm).

The possibility of bad RAM is slim due to the fact that when RAM goes bad it will corrupt the data within it. Data within RAM is CPU instructions, an area known as the stack, and program data (which is usually what people refer to when they say data). You probably wouldn't even be able to install an operating system with bad RAM, you may however be able to boot into the operating system, then have things crash and act unnatural (IE the display starts acting really weird, characters start changing, etc). If you still suspect the RAM, you can go into your BIOS and do a RAM check. The RAM check is dependant on the BIOS, under some you have to disable the "Quick Boot" option, on other's it's known as memory test. Generally when it's enabled you will see it count your RAM a few times.

www.driverguide.com is a good driver location place and good luck

 

[Rockenstein]

Looks like a hard drive problem Laptop drives cost too much - time for a new computer.

Thanks, as always, to The Group

Rockenstein

 

[Grimlock]

have you defragged/formatted the drive?

 

[Rockenstein]

Yeah. This was a fresh install. Formatted. I really think it's just the harddrive going out. It's past the point of even being able to use it now. I'll just sell it for parts on Ebay or something. Hell, the battery and the drives are worth a few bucks

The powers that be can close this thread anytime you want to. It was definitely a hardware failure.

I picked up a cheap desktop on Ubid. I love that site. It'll do me until I can build me a watercooled, overclocked powerhouse.

Thanks again guys,

Rockenstein

 

[The Helper]

- remove dumb response - advice is disable power management.