Computer 'pauses' - WinXP
 

My computer has recently started to 'pause'. Currently it's only doing it when it comes out of hibernate, but I worry as (back when I was using Win2k) it had a habit of doing it on a normal bootup.

The 'pauses' look exactly like a complete (non-bluescreen) crash - mouse won't respond, numlock etc doesn't do anything, nothing happens. Then suddenly it will become active for a few seconds (usually 1-2) before going back into pause mode. Any keys typed whilst paused, or mouse movements made, are suddenly responded to during these active periods - so it's just about possible to shut the computer down from the keyboard. When it restarts, it's been fine.

When it used to do this with Win2k it was a complete pain in the arse; but it used to only do it for the first few minutes after a bootup. I'm not really sure what the WinXP pauses are related to; I haven't made any recent hardware changes and I've had SP2 RC1 installed for a while without any problems. The only thing I've noticed is that when I've shut down the computer from this state it brings up the 'Ending Program....' dialog box for the Bluetooth stack server.

Any ideas?

Computer: XP 2500+, 512Mb, ASUS A7V8X, Ti4200, Rocket 133S IDE card, Hauppage WinTV Go, USR 802.11b card, Belkin USB bluetooth.

Thanks

I had severe problems with SP2 on my computer. I suffered through total lockups, menus not popping up, and double-clciking icons did nothing. Some software would refuse to install as well. My advice is to uninstall SP2 if you can, install SP1 and wait until the official version comes out.

This probably goes without saying, but your problems could be helped if you defragmented and cleaned up your HDD's.

The Bluetooth stack server thing looks like it could be a problem, have you tried disabling it and then running your computer?

Also, this is the thread of mine dealing with SP2, http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...threadid=55499

Sounds like a confict with some of your hardware. Certain types of devices can have problems with hibernation, or it might be a piece of software that is running and is locking your system up like that.

A full hardware lock is hard to do, but is usually some type of memory problem, for example, a driver didn't get loaded back into memory correctly.

I hope this points you into the right direction.

I've seen Windows 2000 and XP pause when there is an application that is misbehaving. For example, iEx (a Mac Expose clone) would crash with the traditional error dialog box and I would close it. Right after, the machine would grind to a halt. I went to second a PC in my office and did a remote view of the processes running on my machine and found that iEx didn't actually close. I issued a remote kill and things returned to normal.

If you have an idea which application is causing the problem (ie: the Bluetooth), try running TASKLIST \\yourcomputer from another PC. You can use TASKKILL \\yourcomputer to terminate the process.

If you don't have XP on the second PC, visit http://www.sysinternals.com/ and download the PSTOOL package. PSLIST and PSKILL will do the same things.

Oh, the fun I'm gonna have with this, and the trouble I'm going to get into.

As a side note, the version of XP I'm running is TASKLIST /S yourcomputer and TASKKILL /S yourcomputer.

I just ended someone playing doom 3 beta and they didn't even know it :lol: :thumbsup:

One (unlikely) option: Windows XP has something called an "indexing service", that scans for file changes on your harddisks. It does this at the most annoying times, and tends to freeze some computers, or at least slow them down. As it's pretty useless unless you do huge numbers of file searches every day, you can safely turn this off (my computer, right-click on dis, properties, unselect indexing service option)

Another option would be a program that is asking 100% CPU time, when it's really really busy. I sometimes have the same thing when running Winrar or quickpar.

Once it starts happening it doesn't stop until a reboot - and loading up task manager appears to show 95% idle (though I'm usually only loading it up to restart the thing!). Thanks for all the advice - I'll give TASKLIST a go next time it happens.
yodapaul - can memory type full hardware locks behave in this way (ie start working again after a few seconds, then lock again etc ad infinitum)?

Thanks for the correction. Nothing like Microsoft staying consistent...

Memory can cause all kinds of problems, from random rebooting to what your post has discribed. I also have seen IRQ and IO hardware conflicts produce the same type of thing. At this point its hard to say what the computer problem could be.

One other thought, maybe one of the Win XP services is not restarting correctly. You might try going to www.blackviper.com and go thought the list of services on your computer and disabling the services that you don't need. That might help out your computer at the cost of lossing some of the extra WinXP features.

I worked on a computer at work that was doing something similar to this. Turned out there was an aplication running that was jumping from using 3% of the cpu to 100% and back and forth, whenever it was at 100% the computer seamed to be totally unresponsive, ending the process cleared it up. If I remember right it was software for a compaq ipaq.

--HGClown