Stutering caused by HDD activity.Help needed.

[yetyhunter]

What causes games to read from hdd. I have 4GB ram with vista 64,that should be enough for any game.

 

[Guest]

you still have to access the hard drive...

how do you think the information gets into ram?

Also why do you think current games install 10+ GBs of information...

theres always hdd access... especially when loading new things

 

[yetyhunter]

It's very frequent and causes stutter.

 

[jitpublisher]

This is normal.
What kind of drive?
If it's SATA, make sure you have the lastest drivers for your controller installed. Vista installs drivers that work with my Seagate SATA II drive, but the read/write and access times were really, really slow. Updated with the correct drivers for my controller, and went from like 3 meg/s read/write and 17ms access time to 84 meg/s read/write and 14ms access time.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Make sure youre running in dual channel mode with your ram. Try memtest to check your ram, see if its ok

 

[bdcrlsn]

Another thing you might consider is any security software you may have. I have NOD32 Anti-virus installed on my machine, and any game I played would stutter and skip, and I could not figure out why until I figured out that the real-time scanner was scanning every file that the game accessed/used, causing the slowdown.

 

[yetyhunter]

I have a sata drive with the latest drivers installed.Memory is in dual chanel mode,I checked with cpu-z at stock speeds 800mhz 5-5-5-15 2T.RAM is fine.
I have nod32 to. How can I disable it when playing?

 

[bdcrlsn]

Well, it was actually caused by the settings of the scanner. It was a while ago that this happened to me, but I will try to remember it:

On the main screen for the program, click Setup in the upper right corner, then click Advanced Setup.

Then click on Real-time file system protection.

There should be a button that says "Setup..." next to ThreatSense engine parameter setup. Click it.

Under objects, make sure Runtime packers is unchecked. Then click Options and make sure that Advanced heuristics is unchecked. Then click Ok.

This advice came directly from Eset, so hopefully it works for you.

(Damn, NOD32 is definitely not a noob-friendly program :lol

 

[dagger]

Ram speed will not cause noticeable stuttering. There are two possible reasons:

1. You ran out of ram, and the system is using large amount of page file off hdd. Since you have 4gb of ram, it should be more than enough with nearly all games, even under Vista, with very few exceptions (FSX, Supreme Commander at higher unit counts... etc).

2. Antivirus on-access scan is on. It's scanning everything that is being loaded. You don't have to, and shouldn't disable antivirus completely. Look into options, and turn off on-access scan.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Yea, I winced after I thought about what Id typed, tho, bad ram can cause some weird problems, but single/dual wouldnt matter in this

 

[customisbetter]

Im going with the virus stuff.
My games are almost unplayable when running scans in the background.

 

[yetyhunter]

Well, it was actually caused by the settings of the scanner. It was a while ago that this happened to me, but I will try to remember it:

On the main screen for the program, click Setup in the upper right corner, then click Advanced Setup.

Then click on Real-time file system protection.

There should be a button that says "Setup..." next to ThreatSense engine parameter setup. Click it.

Under objects, make sure Runtime packers is unchecked. Then click Options and make sure that Advanced heuristics is unchecked. Then click Ok.

This advice came directly from Eset, so hopefully it works for you.

(Damn, NOD32 is definitely not a noob-friendly program :lol

They were unchecked by default. And it still stutter.

 

[yetyhunter]

I disabled some other stuff.

 

[bobbknight]

Google game settings for vista
it will come up with more helpful hints.

 

[customisbetter]

Ok, open taskmanager during a game and look at what is running.
In vista, you should have no more than 43 processes. 42 for Vista + 1 for your game.
Look and see is anything else is taking a lot of memory or CPU speed.