Win XP help, random freezes (+ tweeking tips)

[Tomas]

It's a pain, as the audio stops as well, the freezes last for about a second or so. As I used this machine for producing music, and jitters in the audio stream are bad (tm).

Freezes for one sec then starts working normally again? then freezes again after some random time?
Or does it freeze completly so that reset is only escape?

I had a very similar problem like this... Turned out to be the drivers for the promise raid/ultra cards... the same thing happened on both of them... i think the ide bus would reset, which caused the whole system to freeze up completly for a sec and then work normally for another min or so before it happened again..

Installing the older version of the drivers completly solved the problem.

EDIT:
might be a dying disk also

[Tomas]

Yeah, I'm on a SiS 645DX chipset. I've updated to the latest drivers.. all I can think now is that my HD is crap :-/ but I've never had freezing due to a crap HD before.

my ibm 75gxp did this a few weeks before it died... then after a while it would freeze up totally, not being able to even boot the computer with the disk connected

but yeah as other said... the cause can be many... i would suggest you try to unhook any disks you do not need have to use to boot the sys up

[Tomas]

one question.. did this suddently just happen or has it allways acted like this on XP?

and btw.. the 100% cpu usage spike happened here also.. which was because the ide bus hogged all the cpu. This happened both due to those buggy promise drivers and when my ibm disk died.

I definitely think it is the IDE controller drivers or the disk itself