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Solve : Strange issue hardware or driver?? |
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Answer» Trying to figure out the cause of why on a Windows XP Home SP3 clean build with latest drivers for ATI Radeon HD5450 1GB video card, rest of the hardware is a Biostar A760 M2+ motherboard with Athlon 64 x2 4850e 2.5Ghz CPU and 2GB ( 2 x 1GB DDR2 RAM )... ... issue I have which isn't very critical but is more of an annoyance is that when dragging windows on the desktop I am getting a dragging of overlays trailing the window which remain for about 1/2 second and disappear. It doesn't have to be related to the video driver, it could be any other driver or even a background process of some sort somehow hogging timeslices. Going to check all other driver versions to see if they are up to date as well etc.All else being equal with a fresh install and everything swapped out, my nose would point to the motherboard starting to age. You've swapped out all the appropriate components and Windows should not be lagging. A lot of things could cause Windows lag, but I think you covered all the major ones:
The motherboard starting to die is my favorite solution here. When you did a clean install of Windows did you reinstall on a freshly formatted drive? One last thought. Your other games run fine, how old is your harddrive? Try turning off virtual memory and see what happens. It can be accessed at: Start -> Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Advanced Tab ->Click Change and adjust to 0. When you initially load WoW does the opening animation lag briefly at the start? Good luck, -MalQuote The motherboard starting to die is my favorite solution here. When you did a clean install of Windows did you reinstall on a freshly formatted drive? Motherboard swap out ...... well issue with that is that Linux Mint 17.1 is happy with the hardware. As far as hard drive goes, the history behind this hard drive is that it use to be an external HDD, but because I have a 3TB external this 250GB has since not been used in ages. I carefully opened the external case and removed the 250GB HDD and installed it into this system. In the screenshot showing that its healthy according to crystaldiskinfo you can see that its like a brand new drive with LOW runtime miles on it of just 480 hours. I have a drive in my other computer that is one of the very first SATA 1.5 drives with a date code from 2004 that has over 65,000 hours on it and its still chugging along although only 164.7GB in size and not as fast as the SSD that is in the system with it. Back in 2004 this drive was fast, but its slow in comparison to todays standards. I will try the system with no swap/paging space allocated and see what happens. I have only really done this on systems with lots of RAM that dont really need virtual memory, but we can see what happens. Its not going to hurt anything. As far as WoW loading screen goes, it takes about 45 seconds after clicking to start the game for it to get to the logon screen, and then after that another 25 seconds or so to get into the game with the loading bar showing progress that slowly creeps across the screen. * I expect this due to the ATA100 speed drive, and the fact that World of Warcraft is like 28GB in size, as well as at 2GB system RAM, the HDD is also swapping/paging memory at the same time that its loading so the drive is quite busy when launching games. However, once the games have been launched and loaded, the gameplay is without any lag. Even when taking ports in the game to get from one location to another the load time is less than 5 seconds to get to the destination after entering a portal. I expect this because the game is calling for the map and texture files associated with the new area that i am moving to in game. Moving around between zones in the game I dont have any lag. Its able to keep up with the map and texture loading on the fly when walking, running, on mount on ground, or flying to new zones in which new data is loaded from the HDD for that zone. I think WoW also has a precache that assists with this to where when your in a specific zone, it is programmed to load into a cache area the data from neighboring zones so that no matter what zone you move to, its direct to the CPU from RAM or Cache so it doesnt have to be fetched as scattered on a HDD each time you enter a new zone. [attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Has the HDD dropped down into PIO mode ? ?Thanks Patio ... I will check on this when I get home from work later. The DVD-RW drive that is in this system has also been slow, but I thought that maybe it was because it was an early ATA100 DVD-RW burner. *If both the HDD and the DVD-RW on the Primary IDE Channel are PIO, ( DVD-RW = Master, and HDD = Slave ) then this could definitely lag the read/write speeds of the drives. I totally forgot about PIO Mode Link to process to check this so I don't have to google SEARCH for it later http://techlogon.com/2011/03/28/how-to-fix-hard-drive-stuck-in-pio-mode/Ok... so I checked on if PIO mode was happening and its ultra DMA. *Also realized that its connected to Secondary and not Primary on MB. This shouldnt make any difference, although I could swap the IDE cable to the primary to test. Disabled the Paging setting swap to 0 and problem remains. Pics below show info/results [attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]I just realized, looking at the screenshots, that the more excessive "banding" appears over top of a window that belongs to the "performanceTest" program itself, This is entirely to be expected. For example- here it is in my VM, acting identically to what you've provided in the screenie: Windows 7- the OS from which you got the Graphics Card- wouldn't have this problem except if Aero is disabled because it uses compositing. Most recent Linux distributions- including Mint- use a composited desktop as well. This doesn't explain the other oddities, though I suspect whatever you are using for those graphs on the desktop could cause it. |
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