CPU NOT Multiprocessing or what?

[Jo The Veteran]

I had this thing for a while now, and i guess it's gonna go away if i format the pc... but loosing all the installed programs and configuration... like i said, this goes back a while.

This started after i installed a new MB and CPU. I inputed as the OS my previous PC's ghost image, that is winxp sp2. The OS worked fine on my previous system, a CHAINTECH 7NJS Ultra ZENITH MB and Athlon XP-M 2600+ CPU, or at least without THIS problem.

THE PROBLEM itself is that when i run a heavy duty program, like a compressor, or something that requires the whole CPU in order to finish as fast as possible, i then cannot run anything else. It's like i set a movie to compress using vdub and then set vdub in realtime priority. Only that i don't run vdub in realtime priority. I actually have it default run in idle. However when i start the encode, or any other heavy duty program for that matter, even taskmanager takes allot of time to load, and taskmgr.exe is set by default to run in high priority.

Bottom line, when i run 100% CPU programs i can't do anything else.

And another thing, irrelavant to the problem at hand but usefull nevertheless.
How can i instruct for a program to be loaded in idle priority always? Certain progs. have options about CPU priority, while others don't. Is there a way perhaps to tell taskmgr to always open those programs in idle or is it done another way? another utility perhaps or a registry entry?

Much obliged for anything you got in mind.

[jagabo]

When you're not running anything what CPU usage does Task Manager report?

[deadrats]

I had this thing for a while now, and i guess it's gonna go away if i format the pc... but loosing all the installed programs and configuration... like i said, this goes back a while.

This started after i installed a new MB and CPU. I inputed as the OS my previous PC's ghost image, that is winxp sp2. The OS worked fine on my previous system, a CHAINTECH 7NJS Ultra ZENITH MB and Athlon XP-M 2600+ CPU, or at least without THIS problem.

THE PROBLEM itself is that when i run a heavy duty program, like a compressor, or something that requires the whole CPU in order to finish as fast as possible, i then cannot run anything else. It's like i set a movie to compress using vdub and then set vdub in realtime priority. Only that i don't run vdub in realtime priority. I actually have it default run in idle. However when i start the encode, or any other heavy duty program for that matter, even taskmanager takes allot of time to load, and taskmgr.exe is set by default to run in high priority.

Bottom line, when i run 100% CPU programs i can't do anything else.

And another thing, irrelavant to the problem at hand but usefull nevertheless.
How can i instruct for a program to be loaded in idle priority always? Certain progs. have options about CPU priority, while others don't. Is there a way perhaps to tell taskmgr to always open those programs in idle or is it done another way? another utility perhaps or a registry entry?

Much obliged for anything you got in mind.

first things first, what you are describing are the symptoms of a pc running out of ram, or running out of page file space (what most people call swap space) or an I/O problem. you don't mention what your current hardware configuration, but here's what i would recommend:

get yourself an old hdd (you probably have one laying around) and use that for only page file (i have an old 10gig hdd that i have setup as one big page file), all nt based windows are designed to use the page file no matter how much ram is available, if the file isn't big enough windows will adjust it and if you don't have enough hdd space for it to grow as big as windows wants it, it will bring your pc to a crawl.

also, make sure you have the correct chipset drivers installed and make sure you remove the old drivers for your old motherboard, if you haven't already done so.

that's about it, page file and proper drivers and everything should be back to normal.

as for the priority question, if an application is installed via the msi, then there will be a registry entry that you can edit that will set the default priority for just that app, you would need to do that for every app you wish to behave that way. if the app is not installed, i.e. it just runs from a self contained folder, like virtual dub (and the way all apps should be), then you are SOL, there is no global registry entry to set priority on all launched apps at a certain level.

[jagabo]

With 2GB of RAM and XP running out of RAM isn't likely. Hard drive may have fallen to PIO mode.

[deadrats]

With 2GB of RAM and XP running out of RAM isn't likely. Hard drive may have fallen to PIO mode.

i know it seems odd, but it happens when you don't have enough space on your hdd for the page file to grow, windows, even if you set a user defined size limit, wants to have about ram + 50% page file handy so that it can swap data in and out of ram, if the page file is on a hdd that doesn't have enough room for the page file to grow to that size then has to do everything in ram and things slow down very quickly (<--this is the very non-technical explanation, there's a number of articles in microsoft's data base on this).

my primary pc is a phenom 9500 with 4 gigs of ddr2 667 and i ran into the exact same problem the OP did when the hdd i had the page file on started running low on disk space (i wasn't paying attention and i ended up with less than 500mb on a 640gig hdd, lol) and like the OP, my pc started slowing to a crawl with just 20 tabs open in opera, to the point where it was almost painful to do anything and when i checked my ram usage, with 4 gigs, after taking into account the 1 gig or so windows reserves for OS functions, i was almost out of ram.

sticking that old 10 gig hdd in there and just setting that for paging solved all my problems nicely.

incidentally, vista is way, way better as far as memory management, thread prioritization and page file usage is concerned, i can't seem to recall why i ever went back to xp64, maybe it's time i reinstalled vista...

[Bjs]

This started after i installed a new MB and CPU. I inputed as the OS my previous PC's ghost image, that is winxp sp2. The OS worked fine on my previous system, a CHAINTECH 7NJS Ultra ZENITH MB and Athlon XP-M 2600+ CPU, or at least without THIS problem.

Think this speaks for itself and should have been "self" diagnosed.

You shouldn't run into any major issues with simple motherboard swapping apart from uninstalling non-existent hardware drivers and reloading the new drivers.

Yes the os worked "fine" before ... but you missed what ails the system now.

The culprit is more likely to be the registry hives which retain much information about the older motherboard and drivers when the os was first reloaded and not worth trying to clear ... reinstall the operating system then re-image and all will return to normal ... as far as xp is concerned.

Priority settings will clear always when programs task ends and can not be set permanent.

[Jo The Veteran]

I'll answer each at a time with the order of your replies.

jagabo : CPU shows minimal activity 0-5%, and I always run something in the background, like filesharing, or instant messeging, or even the antivirus that checks the internet connection all the time.

deadrats : My system details are on my computer icon in this site down to the last detail. However to indulge you in even more detail.
Yes i know all about swap, i have it in the same disk with the OS, with 15-20GB free space at any given time. and i also have it system managed so it can grow as much as it wants. You think i should have it in a fixed size? Currently it's the same as the RAM, 2048MB.
I had a leftover driver from my older soundcard (a philips PSC703 pci), and a game patch that somehow got left behind after i unintalled the game long before i swap the MBs-CPUs (carmageddon tdr 2000). I don't think it matters really. If it were a bus driver, or DMA, or CPU for that matter maybe it would have.
I HAVE noticed nevertheless inside the device manager, under the tab system devices that the entry "Motherboard resources" shows 3 times, and that also the entry "PCI standard host CPU bridge" shows about 6 times. Do you think that has anything to do with? Everything else seems fine in there.

jagabo again : The disk in NOT in PIO mode. Firstly i cheched it in dev. manager to be sure and if it was, yes i would had a performance drop, but that wouldn't obstuct me from multitasking. I could encode movies while watching youtube and listening to music alltogether and i wouldn't even know it's there because the data needed for something to encode come at very small bits at a time, same as mp3s and streaming video. On the other hand if i were to burn dvds or copy wast amounts of data (GIGs) i would have noticed the drop.
PIO mode in short makes hard disk slower by transfering the data first to the CPU and then to the memory, while DMA trasfers directly to memory (as the name implies). This has nothing to do with multitasking so that's NOT the problem in order here.

deadrats again : Dude, with requirements like:
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space (WHAT THE F***?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!)
Graphics with 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum) and Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx
required for the vista ultimate, the equivalent for XP pro why should ANYONE install vista on their pc??
And i'm gonna answer as to why YOU uninstalled them in the first place. It's for those ridiculous requirements of theirs.
And to gain what? DX10 support and the ability to play Halo 2?!?
Serioulsy man, you're better of with XP.
Becides the fact that vista sales are nothing like the xp success http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista-struggling-to-match-XP-sales/0,1300617...9282002,00.htm there is also the fact that MS always blunders after a successful OS. Remember good old, buggy nevertheless, but also stable Win98SE compared to the dreadfull millenium edition ones, that horrible OS that spawed so a many service packs (official and unifficial ones) that i've lost track of them. I think they were 8. While in nearly 9 years xp required only 3 major service pack updates. I'm telling you, these were not Windows, they were Widows blacker than hell itself!

Bjs : As i've said in the begining, i KNOW a format will solve this, i've just wanted to find a way around it. It takes me about a full day to bring the settings and programs back to my standards. Do you think maybe what i wrote ubove, and i quote myself

I HAVE noticed nevertheless inside the device manager, under the tab system devices that the entry "Motherboard resources" shows 3 times, and that also the entry "PCI standard host CPU bridge" shows about 6 times. Do you think that has anything to do with? Everything else seems fine in there.

has something to do with it?
I know that priority settings get cleared after you close the app. I'm just trying to find a way to let windows know what priority has a speciffic app. BEFORE it opens.

[thevoelk]

You can do an in-place upgrade, which won't/shouldn't affect your programs and user profile. I'm pretty sure the Windows CD has to be at least at the same service pack level for it to let you do the upgrade, or else it will let you only let you do a clean install.

[RabidDog]

Have you tried re-installing vdub? I think on install it checks whether you have a Multi-core cpu set up.. which you didnt.. and now you have... or jusr re-install windows. ABout launching apps at specific priority.. I think your getting windows mixed up with a Proper Operating System

[steptoe]

If I get t his right, you have installed your OS from your old PC onto your new PC

If this is right then that will be a major issue unless your new PC has the same CPU architecture and the same motherboard

You should never install the OS from an old computer, as its been configured by Windoze to run on that specific hardware setup. If all you have done is change to a more powerful CPU from the same family that fine. Like dropping in a quad processor where before you had a dual core processor and its the same motherboard

The motherboard drivers and probably all the other drivesr are looking for hardware that ain't connected anymore so is getting 'lost' and confused with what the hell is going on, like driving in a a town for years and half of it ha schanged. You drive slower as you can't find anything but do get there eventually


If you're new PC has a different CPU and motherboard, then you have no choice but to reinstall windoze, that should solve your 'issues' and you are likely to bet getting a lot of drivers clashing with each other

[jagabo]

I'd try a repair reinstall before formatting and a new installation of Windows.

[Jo The Veteran]

thevoelk : I don't think an upgrade will fix this, but even if it does it still messes up the system allot. I'd be better off formating but maybe i'll try reinstalling first.

RabidDog : The problem is not centered around vdub, i just brought this program as an example. The pc acts the same in cdex, nero wave editor, wavepad, tmpg encoder, dvdx and in autogk.
If you run a program that uses all of the CPU, then there is none left for anything else and windows freezes until that program finishes it's task, right? Wrong!. Windows uses priorities ad multitasking. So if the enc. program has lower priority, while win explorer and firefox have normal, i can browse in the meantime waiting for it to finish, or watch a movie, or whatever. Even if it has normal priority, even then i can do something else by multisharing the CPU resources.
The only way to really experience what i'm getting is by starting an encode, bring task manager on, and tell it to give realtime priority to the encoder. Try then to browse your disk and see what happens. Maybe do a search for a file.
I know that windows are very wrong in some things, however they still are programs, able to be programed to whatever i want. I've come with countless twicks and tricks that make my life easier in this OS. And I'm SURE there is also this priorities tweak out there somewhere.

steptoe : You could say it's a new machine. New MB and CPU, while everything else is the same and I know the "DON'T INSTALL AN OLDER OS OVER A NEW MACHINE" lecture. I just don't want to wast one day of my life trying to fix the setup i have now.
So please guys, no more lectures about rights and wrongs. Ideas, suggestions, solutions maybe? But no more lectures!

[jagabo]

So please guys, no more lectures...

Har! This from a guy who has spent all his time lecturing everybody else about why their ideas are stupid!

[Jo The Veteran]

Where did i say that any of your ideas were stupid? I just said how these don't apply in the curent situation and why.
I also said from the begining YES I KNOW that formating the f***ing pc will solve everything and that i try to avoid it unless it's absolutely nesessary.
But somehow people overlook that and advise me to format, reinstall, or that what i did was a very very bad thing in the first place (old OS in new pc) and that i should be ashamed about it.
This is a very speciffic problem, not something common. If it were common google-ing it would have been enough. I had just hopped that someone might have had the same bug and managed to get arround it, that all. Obviously that's not the case here so, just forget the whole thing.

[deadrats]

deadrats again : Dude, with requirements like:
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space (WHAT THE F***?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!)
Graphics with 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum) and Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx
required for the vista ultimate, the equivalent for XP pro why should ANYONE install vista on their pc??
And i'm gonna answer as to why YOU uninstalled them in the first place. It's for those ridiculous requirements of theirs.
And to gain what? DX10 support and the ability to play Halo 2?!?
Serioulsy man, you're better of with XP.

the system requirements, while they may seem high, are rather pedestrian compared to what $200 buys you, 4 gigs of ram will only set you back about $100, a cheap quad core will set you back about $200, a dx10 graphics card with 512mb of ram will set you back under $100 and a 1tb hdd will set you back about $100, the requirements for vista are nowhere near to being unrealistic.

as for what you gain, here's a short list:

1) a vastly improved thread scheduler
2) vastly improved memory management (more on that in a bit)
3) support for NUMA (non-unified memory architecture, currently use by amd quad cores, amd's cpu's see a performance improvement when using vista)
4) a vastly improved driver model
5) vastly better tcp/ip stack (way more robust and efficient, more on that in a bit)

memory management: vista does something that i have never seen any desktop OS due before, not linux, not beos, not os x, not bsd, not xp, none of them do this: vista loads as much of the running OS and running apps into ram as it can and runs everything from there. i only discovered this by accident in the following way:

i was using vista ultimate, 32 bit, and i had utorrent running saving things to 4 different hdd's, i had about 5 instances of firefox running, i had a document open that i was working on and i was downloading a game demo to the c drive.

as i'm working on the document, i realized it was time to save my current progress, so i chose to save the current draft to my desktop, when much to my surprise i get an error message from open office that the save location is unavailable (i chose the "save" option which overwrites the current version), so i chose "save as" and tried to navigate to the c drive when i realized that the c drive was not listed. i'm thinking to myself that's odd.

i maximize utorrent and look to see the status of my downloads and discover that the downloads that are being saved to the other 3 drives are going just fine but the ones going to the c drive (the drive that vista was installed on mind you) have stopped and there is an error message next to them about a disk error.

the odd thing is that the game demo download is still going strong, even though i had chosen the c drive as a target, i open up "my computer" and discover that my c drive is gone, windows doesn't see it any more, so i tried to launch the disk manager utility, but i find that i can't use any app that i would access via the "start" menu.

so i try something else and i see if i can copy everything i have on my desktop to a good drive and i find that i can.

that's when i realized what was happening: vista had loaded all active programs, including the desktop, the components of the OS i was actively using, such as the kernel, firefox, open office, utorrent and game demo download into ram and was running everything from there!!! anything that i hadn't been using when the c drive crapped out was gone, which is what you would expect if your c drive just stops working.

i was able to save everything on the desktop and the work i had done to my document to another drive and power down windows. when i rebooted to see if either the bios or my linux rescue cd that i have could see the c drive, i found that it was a goner, nothing could detect it, not the bios, not linux's install routine, not windows install routine, nothing, that drive was history, yet vista had kept on running as if nothing was wrong.

as for the tcp/ip stack, i found that with multiple torrent connections, both inbound and outbound, xp will eventually choke (many people think it's the router but it's not, it's xp) and you will lose your connection, with vista that doesn't happen, i can have as many torrents active as i want and nothing happens. also, download and upload speeds are at least 20% faster under vista than xp.

that's what you gain with vista, and now that i think about it i stopped using it after that hdd drive had died and i just swapped in a backup hdd that had xp 64 already installed on it and i was too lazy to reinstall vista so i just stayed with xp 64.

i think i'm going to see if i can dig up vista again and slap that on this pc...

[Jo The Veteran]

What can i say? if you think they work that good...

I do dislike however all those programs and games with ridiculous requirements. It's not that i cannot provide them the resources for them to work with. It's that i don't want to!

What i mean it's like this. You can make cg movies in a game and waste tons of space, or you can use the game's engine to run the same movies in real time. The later option is harder for the programmers but shows a better work effort. Good and bad programing. I believe that vista is a bad programming example, and that's not entirelly my opinion.

Sure they added some new tricks in vista, like memmory allocation and better/faster connections as you decribe, but they didn't make something new you know. You could say it's a better/flashier/heavier version of xp.

They should have made a better xp version with what you described which also ought to have been less priced than a new OS.

But i all comes down to money money money money money money eventually. How could MS make more $$$ if they sold an upgraded old OS. They couldn't, so the made a new one, added some inovations in it and commercialized the $hit out of it.

Thats why i'll still use xp till i see something really original.

[jagabo]

Did you try a repair reinstall yet? You probably know this but... When you boot an XP CD it will first ask if you want to run the repair console (or something like that, I don't remember the exact terminology). Answer no. Then it will examine you hard drive, see XP is already installed, and ask if you want to attempt to repair the installation. Answer yes. In my experience this almost always fixes odd problems from motherboard upgrades. All you applications and data should be intact.

[deadrats]

What i mean it's like this. You can make cg movies in a game and waste tons of space, or you can use the game's engine to run the same movies in real time. The later option is harder for the programmers but shows a better work effort. Good and bad programing. I believe that vista is a bad programming example, and that's not entirelly my opinion.

first allow me to address your game example: the latter option is not just harder for programmers, it's harder for hardware to actually run.

now is it possible to code a game engine that is capable of rendering a cgi in real time? absolutely. will today's current desktop hardware be able to do it? not on your life!!! consider that it takes a workstation, with dual and quad socket setups, loads of ram (16 gigs on a workstation is not uncommon) and professional graphics cards to render each cut scene in about an hour (and in some cases more) and it should be obvious why they use pre-rendered cgi cut scenes in video games.

now it's true that the industry is working towards perfecting ray-tracing, which will allow the rendering of photo-realistic images in software in real time, but even intel, using it's own custom ray-tracing engine, running on a dual nehelam with 8 gigs of ddr3 and even with that they could only achieve about half real-time.

as for your opinion that vista is an example of bad programming, absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. what really hampers vista (and all microsoft OSes) is microsoft's policy of maintaining backwards compatibility and ensuring that it runs on damn near any hardware configuration imaginable. vista is a marvel of software engineering, when you consider that a browser, like firefox, is composed of about 10 million lines of code, God only knows how many lines of code it takes to code an OS like vista.

furthermore, i know it's very fashionable to bash vista around the web, but most of the bashing comes from people that have never written a line of code in their life, in order to be hired as junior software engineer at microsoft you need a minimum of a masters degree in computer science and the starting pay is 125 thousand a year, in order to be hired as a senior software engineer you need a minimum of a ph.d. in computer science and the starting pay is 250 thousand a year (i looked into it when i was in college), i really doubt that you, or any of the numerous critics you see around the web, know more about vista or about programming than those guys.

now it's true microsoft could adopt a more streamlined, modular approach ala linux for backwards compatibility, but then they would kill the ease of installation and use experience (if you have ever tried to install and run linux on obscure/odd hardware combinations, you would know what i mean).

Sure they added some new tricks in vista, like memmory allocation and better/faster connections as you decribe, but they didn't make something new you know. You could say it's a better/flashier/heavier version of xp.

you have no idea what you are talking about, do you? according to you superior memory management, improved tcp/ip stack, superior thread allocation are all "new tricks" but at the same time you complain that microsoft didn't make something "new" with vista.

exactly what "new" thing would you like to see? what exactly do you want vista to be able to do that it doesn't do at the moment? it supports voice commands:

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/windowsvista/speech.aspx

it supports touch screen:

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/windowsvista/speech.aspx

what exactly is it that you want it to support that it doesn't?

They should have made a better xp version with what you described

they did and they called it vista. just like apple releases updated/upgraded OS X versions, just like novell releases updated/upgraded linux distros, microsoft releases updated/upgraded NT based OSes, and just like apple names each new release with a new name (panther, tiger, leopard) so too does microsoft name each new version it releases with a new name (2k, xp, vista, 7).

[ntscuser]

Jo The Veteran, I had exactly the same problem as you and cured it by uninstalling the drivers which came with the motherboard and replacing them with either default XP drivers or updates from the mobo manufacturer's website.

[Jo The Veteran]

Obviously having no idea of what i'm talking about is what you will call the years of experience working with MS OSs while i installed , uninstalled, copied, formated, backed up - ghosted and used every single OS since the early versions of DOS, plus hundreds of other software that came with them, MS made and not. I know the MS policy about sales, kinda reminds me of Electronic Arts. Make something really fast, sell it before the holidays and fix what bugs might have later on, but you know, i didn't start this post to advertise MS software in the first place so i'll leave it at that.

Thank you ntscuser, i'll try that and get back to you.

[Jo The Veteran]

Hmm... last post got sended two times, no idea why.

[Krispy Kritter]

While reinstalling may solve your problem, some programs just eat up resources. For example, I use emule as a download tool on a secondary PC. While running, it doesn't really use a lot of resources, but when a file completes and it moves that file to the download folder, the PC is totally unusable as you describe above. The problem isn't cpu (in my case anyway), just steady HDD access. I have the same problem when running AutoGK to convert. Whenever it is running, it will max out the cpu, making the PC slow to respond. Hence the reason I do both of those tasks on a secondary PC.

[lordsmurf]

Rule of thumb: new motherboard = new Windows install

[Jo The Veteran]

Krispy Kritter : You could have been me in a parallel universe you know. This is also my secondary/downloads/jobs pc, and i also use dc which acts the same as emule when transfering the finished files to the save dir, if it's on another disk/partition.
Pc really slows down then (although i experienced better performance with 1GB RAM and even better with 2) however it doesn't stop completely you know. You can still browse the disks or web but slower. In my situation the pc stops responding in regular intervals, about 10secs lets say, stops for about another 10secs and continues then again in this rate. Every 10secs i can do stuff for about 10secs, then wait 10secs, then do stuff for 10 secs...

lordsmurf : Sure, format, i know. But NOT before anything else fails, i'm still working on it.