Troubleshooting stutters on Windows Vista

7 March, 2008 (21:29) | Uncategorized

I’ve been banging my head against the desk for months with sound / mouse / video stutters in Vista (x64) Ultimate Edition that would come and go. The cause and solution astounded me - so I thought I would post them here.

I have an MSI P35 Platinum motherboard with an ICH9R southbridge. I’m using the RAID features on the ICH9R in a RAID0 configuration. I also have an eSATA enclosure with an old (relatively speaking) 120GB SATA drive in it. I have read plently of forum posts suggesting switching the SATA controller from AHCI mode to IDE to solve these kind of issues… but as I was using RAID that wasn’t an option.

Thanks to this TechNet forum post I finally discovered that it was my eSATA drive causing all the problems… I had it powered down most of the time, but still connected. Something doesn’t like that (driver?) and causes the stuttering. Switch the power to the drive on, and suddenly everthing is OK!

Comments

Comment from androidi
Date: April 3, 2008, 12:53 am

Hey. Did you report this at the site linked in 3rd post in that thread? It bothers me that Intel has already replied twice that they can’t repro the problem. In the thread we see the same problem across Gigabyte,MSI,Abit,Asus … The only common thing here is ICH9R. Either the drivers are broken or the are some faulty ICH9R chips out there.

Comment from androidi
Date: April 3, 2008, 12:54 am

Oh and if you do report this to them could you link that thread (and mention there’s dozens of other threads reporting the same if you google around).

Comment from Adam
Date: April 3, 2008, 9:46 am

androidi - I’ve now posted my findings to the forum thread also. As you say - there is a minefield of solutions to this problem out there. People can find the forum thread here.

Write a comment