Computer Slowing

[BillP2]

Although my present computer (Athlon 2400+) and hard drive (WD 1200JB) used to be able to capture video through Pinnacle Studio 9, I now find that the Pinnacle capture test reports the transfer rate is too slow. If I go ahead and try to make the transfer, the drop-outs are significant.

So, I wonder what has changed.

I've run virus scans and Spybot, but they came up clean.

Any suggestions as to what I should be looking for would be appreciated.

--------------------- Bill

[ozymango]

Your drive(s) may be fragmented due to moving a bunch of files around over time, so I'd try defragging and see if that helps.

Right-click on the drive(s), go to properties, select tools, and you'll see the defrag option.

[laspis59]

Is your system clean eg junk files removed.CCleaner?
Have you defragmented your hard drive?
Is UDMA enabled,Device Manager?

ozymango beat me.

[Dv8ted2]

It could still be spyware.

Spybot is good, but it is a good approach to use more than one scanner.

Spybot does not catch everything.

[laspis59]

It could still be spyware.

Spybot is good, but it is a good approach to use more than one scanner.

Spybot does not catch everything.

True Dv8ted2.

I would try Ad-Aware SE Personal aswell.

[ozymango]

Is UDMA enabled,Device Manager?

Good catch, you beat me on that one. :P

Yeah, make sure your drives aren't running in PIO mode, I've had a few times where for no reason I could figure out, my main drive dropped to PIO from UDMA 5 and that'll sure put the brakes on things!

[free is better]

are you storing a lot of files on the drive you are using to capture ? if so i have found this to have an impact on capture ability. i am running a 933 mhz dualie and use 1 drive for the os, 1 for the capture and another for long term storage. sometimes i would store 2 or 3 movies that i captured one after another and i noticed it would sometimes affect the capture (before i moved to 15k rpm scsi). however i still make it a habit to delete or move captured movies to the permanent storage drive before capturing to make sure maximum capture ability.

[BillP2]

Thanks to all for the thoughts about this problem.

The (logical) drive I use for the captures has about 45 gig free. (The captures I'm trying to make are only about 1 gig.) According to the de-frag utility, the drive does not need de-fragmenting right now.

DMA is enabled and the hard drive is set up for Mode 5 Ultra ATA.

I'll follow up with the suggestions to try Ad-Aware SE Personal and CCleaner.

I'm also going to borrow an external drive and see if that makes a difference.

(I'm going to be on the road for a few days, but I'll check back here when I get back.)

------------------------------ Bill

[Ai Haibara]

Windows' defrag always seems to say that it's not necessary. It doesn't hurt to try it, regardless.

[BillP2]

Overnight, I ran defrag on the C: and D: partitions of the physical drive.

This morning I ran CCleaner and AdAware to supplement the AVG anti virus and SpyBot that I had previously run.

These actions did not result in a significant increase in the reported sustained transfer rates for the C: and D: partitions.

Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

-------------- Bill

[greengate69]

You could try and look at the running processes in the task manager when you capture (ctrl-alt-del and then task manager - process). Doubleclick the CPU column header to see what is using the most processing power.

In the past I found disabling AV software while capturing made a big difference (that was Norton AV which seemed very resource-hungry). If you do that I would disconnect your internet connection until you can turn the AV back on. You may find some other process which is running in the background which is taking power away from the capturing application.

[Abbadon]

Hi,

The fastest way to resurrect a machine is just formatting the system hard drive and proceed with a clean installation. Of course, first copy to DVD or CD-R the important stuff.

[ozymango]

I just thought of something -- it's possible there's some bug in Pinnacle that's now encountering something else on your system and causing the slowdown, so if you haven't gone to Pinnacle's site to see what the latest patch is, I'd do this post haste!