Adio and speed problems

[killablade]

Right so I'm having a speed problem and audio problems.

Speed problem: Sometimes, after my pc has been on for a while, my pc lags a lot. If I would at that point for example boot up a game it would lag me to death. (both the visual and the audio aspects of the game would lag)

Audio problem: Sometimes I hear crackling noises when playing games, watching videos or listening to music. It's happend with both my Logitech G35 headset and my Logitech speakers (attached to a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio)

Especially the speed problem is bugging me.

Now I haven't tried loads of things to fix these issues but I'll list what I've tried.

- Defragging the hard drives

- Cleaning up my registry

- Let AusLogics BoostSpeed check for problems

- Checked temps of cpu / gpu but they seem fine

- Set everything back to default speeds

I haven't reinstalled my audio drivers yet as I have the problem with the headset and the speakers, but that's what I'm going to do next.

I really don't want to reinstall windows again since thats a huge pita for me as I can't make a backup of all my music, video's and pictures.

Any help would be great!

 

[lasher]

What OS mate? Sys specs would help.

The lag could be something scheduled to run if inactive for any length of time perhaps? defragging / indexing etc...

Think the problems are unrelated, did they both start at exactly the same time?

 

[killablade]

What OS mate? Sys specs would help.

The lag could be something scheduled to run if inactive for any length of time perhaps? defragging / indexing etc...

Think the problems are unrelated, did they both start at exactly the same time?

System specs including my OS (windows 7 ultimate x64) are on my profile.

The problems don't start at the same time.

Because of the audio problem, if anybody logs onto msn right now the sound it then plays is buggy. It's crackling if you know what I mean. It's like there's tiny little breaks in the sound.

 

[lasher]

http://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=75459

only bit of help i can really offer, always used onboard audio. sorry mate.

 

[AMDFTW]

HDD or PSU maybe

 

[killablade]

Actually, I now have reason to beleive the problems are related. I was playing CoD4 and it suddenly starts to lag. After that, I close CoD4, fire up windows media player, and play a song to see if my sound weird. It was. Crackling sound all the way. This was using my Logitech G35.

HDD or PSU maybe

Would you say my RAID0 has been corrupted or is failing or anything like that?

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix this? It would make sense as it's the only hardware change I've made, but because I went to RAID0 I had to reinstall windows aswell so that might be it, too.

I doubt it's my PSU. It's a Corsair one and it's never had to put out more than 450w. I can run stress tests without any problem, too.

 

[killablade]

Update: I ordered an extra hard drive (Western Digital Caviar Blue 640GB) which will be my backup hard drive since my previous backup drive died a couple of months ago and I really need one as I don't want to have to download / rip all my stuff AGAIN. This means that it will be no problem for me to reinstall windows so I'll try that when the hard drive arrives. I will also be recreating the RAID-array to see if that fixes anything.

Oh and do you guys always install the motherboard drivers and stuff? I have (every single time so far) but a friend of mine didn't and his system is running fine.

Update 2: The audio is getting worse. When listening to music it now randomly gives me really loud noise and then goes back to the music. This has only happened with the G35 so far, but when playing audio through my speakers the audio is slower than when playing it through my G35.

Update 3: So last night I looked through my window and noticed that one of my dimms wasn't locked in properly. The top clamp of one of my dimms was sticking out just a bit. Of course I fixed it straight away, but I feel like a nooby, lol. I remember I took it out when I reapplied the tim on my Q8200 and tried to replace the BigBoy fan in the top. If that dimm was the cause for all my problems (I hope it is!)then it should be fixed now. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

 

[killablade]

Yet another update. I'm still getting sound issues after booting up StarCraft 2. After I close the game the problem still lives on.

I'm probably going to format my hard drives and recreate my RAID-array, followed by a fresh install of windows 7. I will do this as soon as the WD Caviar Blue 640GB arrives as I'm not going to go through the drag of downloading and installing everything AGAIN.

I hope it works. If it doesn't, something is wrong with my hardware which I will seriously not like.

 

[killablade]

Drivers were the cause for all of this. And not just my sound drivers either.

I removed the drivers of the G35 and the X-Fi Xtreme Audio. After that I ran DriverSweeper in safe mode.

When that was done, I installed the G35 drivers again and tried to install the latest X-Fi drivers. I couldn't. After installing the X-Fi drivers windows kept telling me there was a problem with the X-Fi Xtreme Audio card. I ran driver sweeper again and tried installing the drivers again. Ran into the same problem.

After that I ran driver sweeper again, and installed the drivers in safe mode. That worked.

So I ran StarCraft 2 again and after about an hour I ran into problems. Everything lagged.

I then uninstalled my GPU drivers, ran driver sweeper AGAIN and reinstalled the drivers. Haven't had any lag issues after that. (so far)

I do have one more problem though. When I was playing SC2 just now using my headphones the sound went weird again and it gave me this really really loud noise. It was as if someone was blowing in his mic really really hard. I immediatelly took my headphones off. It was that loud. After 2 seconds it was gone again. Could this be a starcraft bug or are my headphones broken?

Edit: Nevermind. Sound went crazy again. It's still not fixed.

 

[killablade]

Right. The problem just returned. GG.

The only thing I've installed recently is World of Warcraft.

However, I just started closing programs. I close a program, listen to a song, and if the problem persists, I close another program. Then I listen to another song, etc.

After closing uTorrent, the problem went away. (this time)

Could it somehow be due to uTorrent? (It sounds strange to me)

So.. at the moment the programs on my suspect list are uTorrent and World of Warcraft(maybe the Curse client I installed for WoW addons?).