Win2k "pausing" after minimizing/closing app

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Guest

Guest
Hi,

I just got a new setup: 900Mhz Athlon, MSI k7TPro2A mobo, 256 megs of mem, Maxtor ATA100 HD, Radeon DDR graphics card, basically a pretty decent rig. However in Windows 2000 whenever I minimize or close an application my system "pauses" for a couple of seconds, basically I can't click anything and in some cases the cursor won't even move.
The pause is longer with larger applications. For example, the pause is barely noticeable with IE, but if I open a large image in Photoshop and then when I exit or minimize, the pause can be up to 15 seconds long where the computer won't respond to anything.
I opened task manager and monitored the memory usage: there's always free physical RAM, but the cpu usage gets pegged at 100%.
Does anyone have any idea why this is happening and even better, how I can fix it?
I also have Win98 on my machine and I don't have the same problem there at all. (Could it perhaps have something to do with my hard drive being partitioned and having two OS's?
One more thing: at first I was using the sound card built into the mobo, but my music would stutter and skip whenever I opened or closed any application - it was horrible. So I baught a SB Live and the problem diminished significantly, but it's still there (while my system is "paused" the music still plays even though the mouse won't respond - it'll stutter a bit if it's a medium sized app, or it will stop completely if it's a really big app like photoshop).

Thanks in advance for any help.

PS - I already checked to make sure DMA was enabled, installed latest VIA 4in1 driver, all other drivers are up to date, on another forum some guy mentioned that he had same problem and it was the printer driver doing it - not with me, fiddled with the bios a bit - but I'm not an expert there. So basically I've tried everything I can think of. ARG! Please help.
 

doczenith1

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
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When I first installed win2k with my wd ata100 drive connected to the ata100 via686b southbridge win2k reported it as operating in pio mode. MS KB said that this was indeed an issue that would be fixed in sp2 and that the drive is really running udma, just reporting pio. Well, my system slow as [-peep-] (1gig tbird). After using wd's utility to switch the drive over to ata66 win2k listed the drive as udma and my system was now very fast. My guess is your drive is running in pio mode and a possible reason for the pause is that win2k is writing info to the pagefile in pio mode (slow!!) when you minimize the apps. The photoshop example supports my theory since there is a lot of info to write to the drive. If Maxtor has a util to swith the drive to ata66, try it and see if that helps. Also, make sure the via 4-in-1 didn't load the via busmaster drivers, as they are only for win98. I've seen other post where the 4.28 driver installed the busmaster driver. I've got the 4.25 drivers installed and they didn't install the busmaster drivers. Hope this helps.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Problem solved! It turns out Win2000 was running my HD in PIO mode. All I had to do was install the ATA100 hotfix and it's working as should be (though it's still slower than win98 :( but hopefully SP2 will fix that).
Thanks for your help
 
G

Guest

Guest
Where did you find the ATA100 fix?

John Garrett
System Admin - www.elementk.com
Editor - Exploring Windows NT Professional