System hiccups... annoying

[severtki]

ASUS P5N-SLI board with Core2 CPU, 4gb RAM, 32-bit Vista Business, three SATA drives, mouse and keyboard on USB.

Problem is that the mouse (and entire system) seems to hiccup now and then -- for half a second or up to two seconds, particularly when drive activity is especially high. Mouse freezes and then suddenly jumps when the pause is over.

It sounds like an IRQ conflict to me and I tried toggling the BIOS setting to allow OS to set IRQ. I've plugged the mouse into different USB ports to try that, but not sure what else I can do. It's hard to reproduce on demand, but I'll notice it several times each hour when I have a lot of things open.

Any ideas to try? I *know* I should unplug everything, reinstall OS from scratch, etc. and start adding things back in. No time for that! Any less drastic measures you'd recommend? It might have started around the time I ghosted my C drive to a larger one and started using that, but not certain about that.

Thanks in advance!

 

[somethingsketchy]

What kind of CPU do you have? E5200? E7400? E2000 series?
What kind of HDDs do you have? Some 16MB (cache) HDDs or 32MB (cache)?
Any recent changes you made to the hardware? Such as adding another HDD or upgrading in software?

There could be a lot of possibilities on this, but I'm going to take a guess and say it may be some software running in the background (while you are using the computer) that could be using system resources. That could account for the "hiccup" you are experiencing.

 

[soccerballtux]

keep the task manager open with sort by cpu usage and watch that?

 

[mpilchfamily]

Sounds like a possible video issue. What video card are you using? Where the drivers a clean install or just installed over the old ones? Are you using the latest drivers.

 

[severtki]

CPU is E6300, HDs are: WD 1gb (WD10 01FALS-00JB7B); Seagate 1gb (ST332062); WD 320gb (WDC EACS-00D6B1)
WD 1gb is C: drive and was recently upgraded from a smaller drive (ghosted to new drive). The problems may have begun about that time.
Video is GS7600 something -- older card, did clean driver install, nothing changed on that front recently.

There *is* a lot of background activity (Carbonite backup service runs; Windows Live Sync; etc) and there is a lot of drive activity frequently. Perf Mon shows this file activity; no unexpected CPU activity from unknown processes.

What I'm wondering, though, is why Windows would hold up a high-priority device like a mouse to wait on I/O or something else?? I thought that's what IRQs are for -- to interrupt whatever else is happening to give immediate priority to that device.

I *hate* troubleshooting stuff like this. Too elusive a problem. Any way to determine with a monitoring log what is causing the holdup?

 

[somethingsketchy]

As far as I know of, a mouse (keyboard or any other input device) does not have "top" priority. If you are running something intensive in the background, the input device should not interrupt. Then again the bandwidth for an input device (short of a USB-connected DVD drive or external HDD) is very small.

You said "There *is* a lot of background activity (Carbonite backup service runs)". Are you constantly backing up your drive(s)? This can be a major explanation of why you are experiencing these issues. I am suspecting that sometime during the imaging process or the subsequent re-imaging of your drive, something screwed up and now you are having the noticeable "lag" of your mouse commands.

Also did you mean to say "10GB" or "100GB" for your C: drive? I only comment because there is a significant difference