Every 5 secs or so, my system 'jumps'

sharingan_sasuk · 14 Mar 2006 at 00:56

Hi, I formatted and reinstalled Windows XP a few hours, thinking that it would solve this problem of mine. It started 2 days ago out of nowhere. The first time it occured was while I was playing RF Online and it started jumping annoyingly. I noticed the FPS counter (FRAPS) kept dropping from 60FPS to 55FPS and then back, and it does this ever 5 seconds or so. I thought it was a graphics problem. Then while using Windows as normal, I started dragging some windows around randomly in circles and found that it was skipping at the same rate too. If I play a video or audio file, the video/audio doesn't skip though.

When I first reinstalled Windows, the problem didn't occur because dragging around a window was the first thing I did once I got to the Desktop and had installed the basic things like drivers and Radeon Omega drivers. However, I think it was only once I had installed a few programs, especially Java JRE/JDK, Eclipse, Apache Tomcat and the server when I noticed it had occured again. So I defragged the hard drive and it still occurs. I don't think it was the programs as it was all working fine before I started getting this problem (pre-format) and then it started happening out of nowhere.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm gonna try formatting YET again tomorrow because my group project finishes tomorrow so I don't need the JDK, Eclipse and Apache. I hope it ain't my graphics card. It passes 3DMarks fine with no problems.

P_A_N_I_C · 14 Mar 2006 at 12:42

hiho

sounds like a similar problem i used to have. how much RAM have you got?

this happened to me when i had 512MB ram, things used to stutter a bit, and seemd in a pattern of every 5 secs, mucho annoying. i furgured out the prob was due to the lack of ram and the page file being used a lot on my c: drive.

so not only was my comp using the c: drive to read normally it was being raped becayse of the page file.

i dunno if this is an option for you, but i took the page file of c: and made a new one on my other HDD. the problem instantly went away.

later on i bought another 512MB, but the page file thing worked great until then.

gl

ns400r · 14 Mar 2006 at 15:25

Cleaned your CPU fan lately ?

Simmy · 14 Mar 2006 at 16:54

Are you running NOD32? Or any other AV Program?

Scream · 14 Mar 2006 at 17:49

I've suffered from this problem for the past couple of years on various machines that I've built or came across.

Sometimes I get it fixed and other times I don't.

What you could do is drop your graphics acceleration down a notch to see if that helps.

This has fixed the problems on some machines.

Still not sure why it happens and if there is a more straight forward fix.