Win 7 MC playback pauses

[SJMaye]

Never had this problem with Vista MC.

I get frequent freezes of picture while playing back recorded TV.  It is a freeze in the picture or a few seconds of slow motion playback then it catches up.  At first I thought it was my drive, but I replaced it and got the same thing.  Then I enabled AHCI and still have the same thing.

I wondered about the indexing of files and auto-defrag.   This morning I disabled indexing.  Too soon to tell if it has had a positive impact.  Auto defrag is a scheduled event, so i can’t see how it just happens to affect me all the time.

[swoon]

Did this also happen with your 8600 GT GPU? I’m assuming you are using the latest Catalyst drivers for your Radeon.

Is the drive that contains your recorded TV also the system drive?

[SJMaye]

Yes, this also happened with the 8600GT card.  This did not happen with Vista though.  Odd.  I am running the latest drivers.  The recorded tv is on a second drive.  A 1.5TB Seagate green drive, but a different drive did the the same thing.

I feel the problem is definitely HDD based.  Everytime there is a pause or slow motion you hear the drive rumbling as if to look for something. I can rewind to the same spot and it will play OK.  Do I need a 7200rpm drive?

 

[swoon]

What kind of board/chipset do you have? Have you loaded the chipset and storage drivers?

[SJMaye]

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3.  With a Intel i7-860.  Have I loaded the chipset and storage drivers?  I should have during the install, but I cannot recall and as we saw with the whole video thing I missed some things.

 Would my best move be to update all the motherboard drivers and even the bios just to be sure?  I am traveling this week. I can work on it this weekend.

[swoon]

Make sure you have the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers installed and the chipset inf installed. Also, turn on write-caching in the Windows drive properties and see where that gets you.

Did you format drive with 64k clusters as well?

[SJMaye]

I cnnot remember how the drive was formatted.  It has been a couple years.  I will check all this when I get back this weekend.  I will post back what I find.

 

 

[SJMaye]

OK.   Not for sure, but I do not remember loading any of these drivers during the motherboard install.  I downloaded all the latest drivers and proceeded to install. 

Audio driver-  Success

Chipset driver- Success

Lan driver- Success

Sata driver- screwed the pooch on the install of the “Intel SATA Preinstall driver”. 

I burned to cd.  set in boot sequence to boot from DVD drive.  Nothing so i could tell anyway.  It just seemed to go directly to Windows boot-up.  Then out of frustration I did a forced shutdown while Windows was loading.  When I booted it again it wnet to Windows repair due to the forced shutdown.   It found issues, but did not fix anything.  Asked about doing a system restore, but did not do that as I did not want to reinstall those drivers over again.  I booted in to Windows without issue.  I thought I would check for a system restore point anyway.  Although I know system restore was already enabled it said it was not.  And it will not allow me to enable it.  Strange thing is it shows my C: drive as “Protected”, but shows System Restore turned off.  Whenever I try to look at a possible sys restore point it says it is turned off.  It will not allow me to turn it on.

Good news is at least the HTPC is working so the wife is happy, just would like to fix the system restore thing and continue to update those drivers.

Should I consider updating the bios as well?

 

 

[swoon]

You shouldn’t need the F6 driver which is only used during Windows install sequence when you want to use RAID or if MS had no driver that could control your SATA I/O. All you need is the normal Intel RST driver executable to get the appropriate SATA driver.

You should probably update your BIOS to the latest. Depending on what has changed, you may not “need” to, but it shouldn’t hurt.

[SJMaye]

Not installing the F6 driver is fine by me.  What about the other one for SATA?  “Intel^® Rapid Storage Technology”.  here is the link to the page http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3164#dl

I can update the bios as well.

I think I have found a way to fix my System Restore.

 

 

[swoon]

You should install the “Intel Rapid Storage Technology” driver and the “Gigabyte SATA2 Driver” listed on that page. Your board has two controllers. One is the the native Intel controller inside the P55 chipset and the other is a separate add-on Gigabyte chip.

Also, make sure your recording drive is on the Intel controller. It should be clear from your board manual which ports belong to which controller. It is probably also indicated in silk on the board. The reason for this suggestion is that the Intel controller is much more widely used than the Gigabyte one. I have no reason to believe the Gigabyte chip is an underperformer, but for now, it is probably best to eliminate that variable.

[SJMaye]

Hey Swoon,

I will do ask you recommend, but having a greater problem fixing the System Restore than I thought.   I am trying to fix that first.   I will be traveling again all week.  Will take another stab at this when I return.  I will be in touch.

 

[swoon]

Do you have anything like Norton that can prevent you from making changes to System Restore?

[SJMaye]

No.  The HTPC is running Microsoft Security Essentials. 

So far no luck.  May be doing a full reinstall, but will give me a chance to fix these things from the ground up.

[SJMaye]

Hi Swoon,

Back from traveling again and I have repaired my System Restore.  Albeit not the way I would have wanted.  Instead of doing a full reinstall I did a repair install.  It worked, but I was looking forward to doing clean install and creating a drive image with SP1 and all updates so I would not worry about this again.

Right now I am installing all the motherboard updates minus the bios update.  I will check for any improvement in system performance.  If the pauses persist i will do the bios update.

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