Computer "stutters" When Doing Anything

I have multiple degrees, tons of certs and over 45 years of experience and if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that there is always more to learn. In fact, the more I learn, the more I discover there is yet to learn.

And it is not just new things and new technologies to learn. We have to learn how advances change things from what they were. And more importantly, we oldtimers need to accept that things change and what we knew to be true may no longer be.

For example, what we used to automatically do to XP to improve performance is probably detrimental to Windows 10 performance today. For example, we used to automatically disable indexing in XP but should leave it enabled in W10. Setting a manual Page File was common in XP, so was disabling the PF if we had lots of RAM installed. But with W10, it is best to just let Windows manage it.

So we need to keep looking forward to stay on top of advances, and we need to look backwards to see if things are still the way they were - and then accept that change is inevitable and typically good.

 

I'm starting to learn that "schooling" to learn IT is basically elementary at best. Thanks for being there. Also I should have an update for you all tomorrow morning as a buddy of mine is coming over. I know the monitors are good (they worked a few days ago) and everything is plugged in as far as I can see. But again I will have an update for you all tomorrow.

 

It is much more than elementary. It teaches you the big picture and exposes you to elements and areas of expertise you likely would not even know existed otherwise. And that's a good thing - a very good thing. And school teaches you how your areas fit into the even bigger picture. And all that is important - especially if you want to lead a team or workforce.

For example, there are many folks who call themselves computer techs because they have lots of experience building or repairing computers - but no formal training. But let's face it. If you know how to use a #2 Phillips screwdriver and can follow simple illustrations in your motherboard and case manuals, anybody can put together a computer, swap out a power supply, or add RAM. These folks often never heard of Ohm's Law, understand the atomic theory, the significance of free electrons in conductors, how current flows in a circuit, how to properly solder or use test equipment or read a circuit diagram. They don't understand what happens to their data once it leaves their modem. And worse, they often don't realize that anything that plugs into the wall can kill!!!! It scares me to death when I see advisers on these forum tell posters to open a power supply and stick highly conductive meter probes in there - typically with no warning about fires, shorts, or death! Because they had no formal schooling, they know or care nothing about electronics safety.

It took me two years of extensive, formal classroom and on-the-job training in electronics, then extensive certification training and nerve wracking "over-the-shoulder" evaluations before I could call myself a "electronics technician". And even then, I did not know how to repair and maintain our new air traffic control transceivers until I went back to school for more education on these new radios. It took another couple years of on-going training and formal education before I could become a "master electronics technician".

Most certs expire. What good are my Novell Netware, Token Ring, or Windows for Workgroup 3.11, or OS/2 certifications now? None at all. But my degrees in electronics systems technologies from 20 years ago are just as pertinent today, still sit at the top of my resume, and are always good for a better paying job.

Don't underestimate the value of school. My background was as a radio communications technician but because my schooling gave be the education of electronics, it was easy for me to move into repairing computer hardware.

Experience is great. Some say 2 years of experience in the field is equal to 1 year of school. But experience still tends to be narrowly focused. School provides the foundations and the big pictures.

 

My day job involves teaching others how to troubleshoot and solve computer problems (trainer in a PC upgrades support center), and in one of the greatest strokes of irony of all time, any one of the guys on my team, whom I train and teach, has more formal schooling and degrees in computer technology/knowledge than I do. I have a combination of self-learning and on-the-job training that has given me a solid base of computer tech knowledge, with additional in-depth knowledge of the products the company specializes in (duh). What I use my knowledge for more than anything else -- here at MGs as much as at work -- is to figure out what I need to learn in order to deal with the situation in front of me.

Skilled troubleshooters are a little bit like actors or musicians that way. Denzel Washington is a brilliant actor, but every time he takes on a new job, he has to sit down and study for that new role, or he won't be able to pull off a convincing performance. Similarly, Slash and Zakk Wylde are both taking guitar lessons and practicing on a daily basis, and they both still need time and patience to learn a piece of music they've never played before.

Yes, it's the same thing. Troubleshooting is not an exact science anymore than overclocking is. It's an art.

Yes, please. We're invested now. We want to know how this ends!

 

Okay so dumb part on my behalf. I laughed hard when I figured out what was wrong. So a buddy of mine came over took a few seconds look and said, "Dude seriously?" I asked what happened and he proceeded to lift up an 8 pin power connector that goes into my mobo to power the CPU. I laughed hard for a few minutes. So he noticed that 275 GB of my 3TB hdd was not allocated. So apparantly with a X86 Win 7 install it can't do anything above 2.2GB HD space allocation. Also apparantly I can't utilize all 32GB (actually closer to 4 or 8 GB) on an X86 version. When I get home I will be installing a X64 bit of Win 7. Although I'm thinking of going to 10 since Win 7 doesn't support UEFI booting. Also what is UEFI? I don't understand that

 

Also, I will be grabbing the RAM voltages as requested and let you guys know. What should my ram voltage be? I did some research and according to this link https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/li...=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7 I can only have 4 GB of RAM being used at all times. Could this be the cause of my stuttering perhaps? I ran a Memtest86+ last night through this morning and no fails (10+ hours of testing)

 

I have many fond memories of forgetting to flip the PSU switch to "on" after assembling a build, and having near-panic attacks before figuring it out. Fun times... The good thing about "dumb" mistakes like that - they are quick and easy to fix.

Windows 7 64-bit is much better and smoother than x86. My suggestion is switch to 7 first. If you still want 10 you can now get the free upgrade if you grab it before next Friday.

UEFI is what replaced the BIOS, which essentially is an interface that lets you see and change settings in the motherboard firmware. UEFI is newer, and better, and often also easier to use. A good UEFI can boot in either UEFI Boot mode or in a legacy mode that sometimes is called just that, and sometimes called BIOS mode. Booting in UEFI mode is safer from a computer security standpoint, and often faster as well.

For those particular Ripjaws, your voltage should be 1.5v, and the four main timings should be set to this:

• CAS = 9 (This one is sometimes called tCL in UEFI/BIOS)
• tRCD = 9
• tRP = 9
• tRAS = 24

Even if the motherboard's auto settings puts it at those numbers, over-ride that and manually input those four and the voltage I gave you. Auto-voltage sometimes fluctuates, which is bad for computer stability.

Where and how to set the timings and the voltage will be described in that all-powerful motherboard manual.

 

@Mimsy Thanks for the information. I will ensure that the timings are set to that and the voltages 1.5v. I will update later tonight. I had a feeling my hardware wasn't bad but was still freaking out haha.

 

Wow! This says it all in one sentence.

As far as dumb mistakes like power switches to off - here's a totally OT, but totally true, story that may amuse some.

At a large Air Force Base in the southwest, there is a small mountain on the base that's been carved out and used to store... err... "stuff". I don't know about now, but at the time, surrounding the mountain were two tall electrified fences about 10 feet apart. To get into the storage facility, you had to be cleared by armed SPs (Air Force military police) at the gate after presenting the proper passphrase for the week and showing your ID, then doing that all over again when you entered the mountain through the control center, manned by several more SPs.

At night, the whole area, in particular the perimeter fence surrounding the mountain and the space between the two electrified fences were lit up with flood lights. And this area was monitored by several CCTV cameras with monitors in the control center.

I used to be in charge of Job Control, a 24/7 support center for "Communications Electronics" on base. Late one moonless night I got a call from the Job Controller on duty saying the SPs wanted our CCTV tech out right away because all the CCTV monitors went "black". I got involved because the boss of our CCTV shop, mad for being woken up, refused to respond insisting his shop was not required to provide 24/7 support to the mountain. He felt the SPs could get off their rear-ends and monitor the perimeter the old-fashion way - by patrolling - which was their contingency policy. The SPs elevated it up their chain of command and it came down my chain to where I had to order the CCTV NCOIC (non-commissioned officer in charge) to check it out.

Now this mountain is about 20 miles deep into the base on a dusty, desert, dirt road. Not fun at 3 am.

When the CCTV NCOIC got out to the mountain, through the gates and into the control center, sure enough, all the monitors were "black".

Without saying a single word, the CCTV NCOIC walked over to the wall, flipped the big switch labeled with big bold letters "PERIMETER FENCE FLOOD LIGHTS" to the "ON" position. Suddenly all the monitors lit up showing the fence.

He turned and walked out the door - there for less than 30 seconds. True story! And scary too - with at least 6 guards, including the two outside at the security gate who could see the lights were not on, and no one connected the dots that the monitors were working just fine, simply displaying the night's moonless darkness.

 

I'm inclined to agree with you - I think your hardware is fine, but not configured optimally. The more high-end your motherboard, the more you have to spell out for it, both when it comes to memory and CPU.

And Digerati, that made me laugh so hard my dog came over to see what I was doing. And she's sick, so that takes a lot.

 

Okay I have an update for you all. Recently (about the span of 4 or 5 days ago) my computer when it was booting up wouldn't recognize the HDD. So I went into the BIOS and made it Boot #1. I noticed that I had to do this every time. So I thought maybe I'm just not saving it correctly. So fast forward to last night I went back into the BIOS and it said Disabled for my HDD. I thought that was strange and couldn't make out what the cause was. Today when I went to open up Firefox and go to my GMail I got en error with Skype saying that some of the files that Skype uses to run cannot be found. Right after that my computer blue screened for less an half a second (I couldn't get the error code and had to go to work so I didn't go into Event Viewer to grab it). As a side note I noticed that when I installed Windows 7 Ultimate I had about 700 GB of unused space that I couldn't allocate at all. On my way to work I called a buddy of mine to explain what happened. He said it makes sense and that would potentially cause the slowdowns because if my HDD is having trouble locating files it would "appear" that my computer hangs up and it would also appear that it could be the ram. Another side note here is that I ran Memtest 86+ for 24 hours and not 1 damn error in RAM. So yeah I'm almost certain the RAM is good (even though it was suggested that it could be the timings and not the actual RAM itself). What are your guys's thoughts on this?

 

That sounds like the drive is slow in reporting it's existence/stats to the BIOS/UEFI, a fault in the first area of the drive? The other (Skype/blue screen) errors might indicate that drive corruption is more widespread.

What is the total size of the drive?

I don't see anything memory (RAM) related here.

 

The total size of the drive is 3TB. When I installed Windows 7 Ultimate I could only have like 2.4-2.5TB of space allocated. The rest gave me an error (don't remember the error).

 

Hmm, maybe related to this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2581408 (I've never used or setup anything that large, so I've no experience of it)?

 

Do you know if your HDD is set to MBR? Windows 7 defaults to MBR drives and NTFS partitions, and they suck at supporting partitions larger than 2TB because that capacity wasn't on anyone's radar back when MBR and NTFS were invented. Try splitting off enough of your drive's empty space into a new partition that your main partition shrinks to below 2TB, and see if things run smoother.

Here is the thing though... if your partition size is unsupported by your operating system, your BIOS has no clue and everything happily works in that department. That worries me. If this is the Seagate from earlier in the thread, it might be worth running SeaTools on it to make sure your HDD isn't having health issues. Just to make sure. (SeaTools is Seagate's drive health utility. get it from MGs or from Seagate support, and nowhere else.)

 

I actually did run the Seagate HDD checker app and all the tests I ran stated nothing wrong. Now when I try to boot my pc doesn't boot into Windows. Goes straight into the BIOS. In the BIOS my HDD is listed as Disabled in the Boot Sequence. I have not been able to boot into Windows since before yesterday.

 

Next troubleshooting step then would be to try your HDD i the next empty port on the motherboard. If that doesn't work, try with a different SATA data cable.

 

So I put in a different HDD and it works flawlessly. I figured I could try to format the original HDD on my laptop using an enclosed HDD connection where you plug the sata and power connector and it connects via USB to a computer. No dice. The HDD doesn't even appear to be detected by the HDD enclosure at all. Oh well. Consider this closed as Im ordering a new HDD on Friday. Any suggestions on HDD's?

 

A good SSD!

 

Well Bill I don't know what a good SSD would be. I know that SSD's are amazing but I've never used one and I require (only because I have a lot of games, videos, and software) quite a bit of space. I almost had that HDD 70% used as far as storage goes. I'd like to stick with HDD's but if you can recommend a good SSD for say Windows and a decent HDD for games/software I'd go that route.

 

I have had great success with Samsung 850 EVOs and Pros. Videos can still go on HDs if you need the space, but everything, and I mean everything will benefit if put on a SSD. Even the slowest SSD will run circles around the fastest HD.

And there's no worries with modern SSDs with limited number of reads and writes. That's only with first generation SSDs. After all, Samsung would not warranty their 850 Pros for 10 years! if they didn't have faith they would last.

Yeah, they cost more, but remember you spread that cost over the life the drive. Factor in the lower energy costs to run them, and the lower cooling costs (if you air condition your computer room) and the higher costs become much less significant - especially after you factor in how much happier you will be with their performance.

I'll never go back to those archaic, clunky, noisy, big, heavy, electromechanical hard drives.

 

One of these.

Don't let the price tags discourage you, those are all terabyte class drives, meaning they cost a bit more. If you are content to settle for a 512GB or 256GB level drive only for booting, you can get one for less than $100 if you prefer.

SSDs are the future, the best, the superior technology that makes HDDs go where dodo birds and betamax tapes live these days. Yes, I'm biased because it's my job to sell them, but they really are that much better. Worth every penny.

 

FTR, I have a Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD as my boot drive. It also contains all my programs, including Office 2007 professional, and all my personal data files (email, Word docs, etc.) and I still have over 100GB free. Oh, and it also has a 15.4GB Windows.old folder that was just created by the Anniversary update a few days ago. The Windows.old folders are created in case you want to roll back to the previous version. They are huge, but they also are automatically deleted after 30 days. If certain all is okay and you will not want to roll back, you can manually delete them.

I have a Samsung 850 EVO as my secondary drive that keeps a backup of my boot drive, my Downloads folder, and 3,727 of my favorite songs off my 600 CD music collection, and my family photos and I still have 49GB free there. Most people really don't "need" terabytes of storage space.

I'm biased because they ARE so much more superior. IMO, the only thing an SSD is inferior at is as a paperweight.

 

The Anniversary Update only allows rollback up to 10 days: http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/...-period-10-days-windows-10-anniversary-update

 

I agree with the Samsung 850 pro/evo, route. I have it as Virtual Machine storage on a new computer I'm building. Also use the Samsung 950 Pro NVME route for faster boot than SATA connections. Of course, this requires newer hardware.