High hardware interupts taking up cpu power on an xp machine

katana_3

Have a machine that had significantly slowed down so installed sysinternals to see what was going on. Sysinternals shows a high amount of cpu time taken up by hardware interupts. I tried a different network card, video card and still got the same thing. I tried disabling non essential stuff, such as cd drives and usb root hubs, in device manager in Win2k. But this didn't change anything.

I decided to upgrade to XP from win2k. This because i saw alot of sharing of irq11 so decided that it could be a problem. Things were alright for a while and now its back. Any idea how I can find out what is going on, or what can more can i do to fix it.

Thanks

fwor

Since updating the OS, have you gone to the PC/motherboard manufacturers website and downloaded the correct drivers for all of the on-board devices?

Sometimes the "generic" drivers that are shipped with XP work, but not very well...

katana_3

No, thought the drivers would be better that win2k ones. But will wander on to the website, oh its a Duron 1300 so its a bit old, but i don't really want to replace it.

espresso

Check Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) to see what processes are using up your CPU power. Run ccleaner here to purge your machine of unnecessary crap. What anit-virus/malware/spyware programs are you using?

marble

Have you made sure that your hard disks are using DMA rather than PIO? There used to be a bug that caused them to return to PIO mode randomly (though I thought it was fixed an XP update).

Other than that, could be a driver issue I suppose. Does the sysinternals tool tell you which irq is causing the interrupts (or is there any other tool that will?)?

Al

katana_3

espresso wrote: »

Check Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) to see what processes are using up your CPU power. Run ccleaner here to purge your machine of unnecessary crap. What anit-virus/malware/spyware programs are you using?

Well the cpu power is being taken up by the hardware interupts.

I'm using, zonealarms firewall, spyware guard, avg and the new one by spyware search and destroy.

katana_3

marble wrote: »

Have you made sure that your hard disks are using DMA rather than PIO? There used to be a bug that caused them to return to PIO mode randomly (though I thought it was fixed an XP update).

Other than that, could be a driver issue I suppose. Does the sysinternals tool tell you which irq is causing the interrupts (or is there any other tool that will?)?

Al

How would I check? XP is upto date.

marble

Have a look at this for checking/enabling DMA
http://club.cdfreaks.com/1712829-post5.html

The bit you are interested in is what is under current transfer mode ... it should be ultra dma or something similar.

katana_3

Well I've checked and both are set on DMA if available but the transfer mode states its currently running in pio mode.

Looking at the device manager for the disc drive at it does not mention DMA or PIO. The disc drive is a WDC-WD800BB-75CAA0

Well I uninstalled the driver, and the machine did a restarted, reinstalled the driver did another restart and now its running as a DMA and hardware interupts are running around 1.6 maxi i have seen is around 10 for less than a second. But now seems to have settled.

Thank you I thought it was a hardware fault and was lloking at replacing the computer but you have saved me the cost of a new computer. Thank you.

marble

If it's running in PIO mode, that'll be the cause of your issues. The WD800BB is an Ultra ATA/100 hard drive, and is capable of running Ultra DMA. There used to be issues if you had a non UDMA CD-Rom drive on the same cable, but since this problem has randomly started happening, I suspect that is not the issue here.

I'd try this (copied from the kb article here):

1. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management.
2. Click System Tools, and then click Device Manager.
3. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers node.
4. Double-click the controller for which you want to restore the typical DMA transfer mode.
5. Click the Driver tab.
6. Click Uninstall.
7. When the process completes, restart your computer. When Windows restarts, the hard disk controller is re-enumerated and the transfer mode is reset to the default value for each device that is connected to the controller.