Hi,
For about the last 1 or 2 days in windows xp, the computer will freeze for between about 0.5 and 2 seconds… or at least I can’t move the mouse. And a lot of the time there is a pc speaker beep at the same time. (I have the sound running through headphones and I can hear the beep without them, so it must be the pc speaker)
I’ve tried updating my virus scanner (avg free) and doing a scan and I also used system restore to take the system back a few days.
I’ve got WinXP Home, a P4-2400 with hyperthreading, onboard sound (ASUS P4S800 motherboard), a USB 2.0 PCI card (the onboard USB ports don’t seem to work in 2.0 though I didn’t spend a huge amount of time troubleshooting that), D-link DSL200 USB modem, a USB external harddrive (usually off), 2 internal harddrives and 2 CD/DVD drives.
Anyone have any idea about what it might be? Thanks.
Go to www.sysinternals.com and get “Process Explorer”. This is a task manager replacement, except it gives you tons more info about what’s going on. One feature that I love is that when you go to the CPU Usage graph (which you get by going to View->System Information), you can point at a spike that occurred in the past, and it will tell you what process was using the most CPU at that time.
it didn’t even have a spike… though the default update speed was 1 second… I’ve set it to the minimum (0.5) so maybe it will catch it… and it could be that it just freezes the mouse rather than the whole system…
It still isn’t showing up as a spike. The CPU usage remains at about 3-5% even though I’ve got quite a few programs running at once.
It seems that only the mouse pauses - the CPU graph continues to move.
Well my keyboard stopped responding during the beep as well…
When I move my mouse around sometimes after about 5 seconds it freezes for a second. Though it hasn’t happened for about the last minute (usually this only happens every couple minutes).
I had the same problem with XP pro. The mouse would freeze for a second or two, and if any music was playing it would skip. It would do this about once every 80 seconds or so. If you looked at the task manager you would see this spike associated with it. It kind of looked like a really slow heart monitor.
On my machine it was the “system” process that was doing this. It still does it sometimes today, but it goes and comes in seasons. For a month it will do this a lot and then it will not do it for a few months. It is very intermittent, but if I restarted my computer it wouldn’t start for an hour or so.
I never found a cause. I never found any virus or spyware to be a cause.
Well I had the mouse plugged into the PS2 port using an adapter but now it is plugged in the USB socket… now there are no pc speaker beeps… instead there are the USB plug and unplug sound effects. I think the mouse has been temporarily “dying” then working again… I can make it happen fairly well on demand by moving it around rapidly… maybe it has some loose wires. I’m going to try using another mouse (I’ve got spares)
USB mice feel differently: smoother, but also occasionally “lagging”.
I caused the issue described above by raising the PS/2 sampling rate above the “safe” 100 Hz setting to 200 Hz (new to XP). It was almost as you described: mouse movement took priority over keystrokes, which accumulated in a buffer instead of being processed if the mouse was moved rapidly, and then those keypresses were handled all a the same time, and Windows beeped as if all of those keys would have been depressed simultaneously.
The solution was to lower the PS/2 Sample Rate (Control Panel - PS/2 Compatible Mouse - Advanced Settings).
There’s plenty of PS/2 hardware around for guys who have been working since 1973. LOL.