hey guys this is a problem ive had for ages and ages. ive even tried upgrades and testing all me gear but i still cant work it out. ive tried playing movies in all different players too.

the issue is this: while playing any movie on the computer i get frequent skipping/chugging moments. it happens totally randomly as far as i can tell, might not happen for 5 minutes then it will happen every few seconds. it never seems to put the sound out of wack or anything.

if anyone has had any issues like this it would be good to hear from u, ive tried searching google for countless hours. im at a loss.

computer specs are this:
asus a8n-sli deluxe
athlon venice 3500+
ocz 2 x 1024mb platinum ram
western digi 200gb sata
xfx 7800gt OC
enermax 650watt noisetaker psu

i also only recently formatted and reinstalled windows XP so i dunno what to do!

cheers in advance, bardo.

u download them in torrent form?

nah... these are actually all legit dvds i own, tonights i was watching a few from the vid store coz my real DVD player is bonked. it happens playing any media at all. mp3s, games, movies everything.

who knows.....

Are these disks scratched in any way too? And this happens to all original and back up disks?

I'd have a gander at spyware/virus spiking your cpu usage or codec issues. Do you use spyware scanners and what method do you use to install codecs?

nah i checked the obvious stuff like scratches or anything. the thing is that it happens in all games, movies, mp3s. everything thats played off the pc chugs, even if its only for a minute moment, its just really darn annoying! i cant put my finger on it...

even sometimes if im moving the mouse around you can see the mouse chugs on the screen just for the smallest moment...

last edited by bard at 00:07:38 18/Jan/06

Maybe HDD related? I'd suggest that DMA setting thing but I just checked in WinXP and doesn't seem to be there (or was that only ever for CD/DVD drives anyway?)

The pc i use to watch movies on every so often (maybe one out of every four movies) sometimes freezes for a moment or two as well, the sound plays as normal but all comes good after a secend.

yea i was thinking it could be a hdd related problem, i tried different sata cables and then plugged into different sata plugs on the mobo.

all the gear has never been overclocked except the cpu by 200mhz. im gonna uninstall system drivers and see if it still happens...

i would start with ur video card drivers.

yea im thinking its hdd related aswell, someprog writing to the page file perhaps.
if your mouse chugs tho suggests its usb and having to wait while hdd has the fsb tied up.

quick fix:
run through task manager click 'end process' on every process listed untill your down to 15-18 processes.
the ones that windows needs wont end so dont worry.

then try it again. once u figure out which one it is goto msconfig and stop it from starting

Maybe HDD related? I'd suggest that DMA setting thing but I just checked in WinXP and doesn't seem to be there (or was that only ever for CD/DVD drives anyway?)

Having a hard-drive revert to PIO Mode could cause freezing/skipping as described.

BUT .. bard mentioned he is using a SATA drive. From my understanding, PIO Mode is a PATA-only issue.

last edited by parabol at 00:54:01 18/Jan/06

ok i think ive got it all worked out.. i uninstalled pretty much all the system drivers, the old nvidia chipset drivers, old nvidia display drivers, realtek sound drivers

and then i installed all new sets of drivers and used the nvidia chipset drivers for the soundcard instead of the realtek. and ive put on a dvd for 15 minutes and its working just awesome :)

so far so good. lets see how she goes. seems to be running pretty good now. thanks everyone for your suggestions...

While I'm here, if it doesn't end up sorted out or for future reference, I had probs with network connections if they weren't disabled but there was no connection (no wire connected or no wireless signal) every now and then I believe it was trying to connect and was causing these freezes.

If ever you experience DVD problems the first thing to do is update the chipset drivers. DVD players will not function properly without them. The default windows drivers or even old drivers will not do.

by the way, don't install the Nvidia SW IDE drivers from the NForce4 chipset driver set.