Audio Skipping when playing games.

[Diresu]

Well, everything worked fine last night and today when ever I play a game the sound is skipping. The game itself runs perfectly fine but the sound skips. This is most likely related to my other issue. Basically for the last few days when I shut the computer down, and then turn it back on, you hear and see everything go on except the monitor stays in power save mode and doesn't boot to anything. Same result as if you were to turn on the monitor with your PC off.

In order to get it to boot I had to restart the computer about 10-20 times before it would boot normally once. I been having this issue lately quite a bit and I have no idea whats causing it.One of the times i rebooted i got a disk read error and I thought it might be the HD but its a new one and I replaced it for pretty much the same issue not even 3 months ago. If you need any more info ask away, I have aida installed if any more hardware info is needed.

My comp specs are:

Motherboard Abit AS8
CPU: P4 3.4 with 1 MB of cache and HT
Video Card: Nvidia Ge-Force 6800 Ultra
Ram : 2 gigs of pc3200 OCZ
Audio : Onboard audio

Thanks. This is just driving me nuts because I can't figure out whats causing either of these issues.

 

[DragonMaster]

Do you have the latest BIOS?

In my case, when I just got my SATA card, I had to reinstall Windows about 4 times in two months, just to find that the BIOS of the SATA chip was just bad. After updating it, no more problems!

Also, get a sound card,, even if it's just a $30 Audigy SE.

 

[KingCody]

at first I would have said it's a driver issue, but taking your other problems into consideration, and the fact that you didn't list it as part of your comp specs it sounds like a power related problem.

what brand and model is your power supply?

how many amps can it provide on the +12v?

he shouldn't have to buy a sound card, there is no reason for the onboard sound not to work.

 

[Diresu]

at first I would have said it's a driver issue, but taking your other problems into consideration, and the fact that you didn't list it as part of your comp specs it sounds like a power related problem.

what brand and model is your power supply?

how many amps can it provide on the +12v?

he shouldn't have to buy a sound card, there is no reason for the onboard sound not to work.

BIOS Properties
BIOS Type Award
Award BIOS Type Phoenix-Award BIOS v6.00PG
Award BIOS Message
System BIOS Date 08/18/04
Video BIOS Date 10/08/04

BIOS Manufacturer
Company Name Phoenix Technologies Ltd.
Product Information http://www.phoenix.com/en/products/default.htm

Copied straight out of AIDA

Power Supply is : OKIA 550 ATX (550W max)
Max DC output for a +12 is 24A

 

[KingCody]

OKIA makes garbage power supplies. there is no way that thing even comes close to 550w (or 24amps). It is a likely candidate to be the cause of your no-boot/no-video/no-sound issues.

I strongly suggest replacing it with a quality brand like Antec, Enermax, or Fortron to name a few. cheap power supplies like OKIA's do not provide stable voltage regulation, cannot provide continous and consistant amperage, and have little or no protection circuitry to prevent it from taking out your whole system if it's having a bad day

I cannot stress enough the importance of a quality PSU. not only for the protection of your expensive computer components, but also for maintaning a stable computer. hardware problems are very often misdiagnosed as faulty when it was the power supply all along that caused the issue (people find this out after spending alot of money on un-needed replacement parts).

it may not end up being the cause, but it should be replaced anyways, and ruled out as the first suspect

oh, and by the way... welcome to techspot
also, there is no need to quote the previous post, use the reply button instead (this helps keep the thread "uncluttered"

 

[Diresu]

Ahh thanks for the Welcome , and thanks for the help.

What puzzles me is that one of those reboots was to a "disk read error" which made me think its the HD, though newly replaced. Power supply was the same for few years now and It worked "more or less". But I will try and get a better one. My pc was built for me by someone else. I know a fair bit about computers and all that, just not to good on the hardware end. Know it all in theory, need practice

My other thought was that it might be the ram, but no way to pinpoint the problem.

Also, just to make it clear my sound worked fine last night, then I ran into the reboot issues and then it studders. It works ok on videos and audio files but on games it skips bigtime.

 

[KingCody]

well you could always run memtest to check for RAM errors, also try each RAM stick individually to eliminate a possible bad stick. although it doesn't sound like they are the culprit.

it sounds like you experience the problems when your PC is under load which stresses the power supply. with cheaper power supplies, the higher the load you put on it, the voltages become unstable, the unit gets hotter, and the amperage falls. that means that your hardware components do not get the power they need to operate properly. the older the PSU gets, the worse that problem becomes.

 

[Diresu]

Sounds good. I will take your advice and get a new one and post how that goes. Think I should be able to do that much myself. Thanks again. Should I go for a 500 + one again? Anything specific to look for so i don't buy a bad one again?

 

[KingCody]

there's no harm in getting a 500w or higher, but you shouldn't need any more than 350w-400w if you buy a reputible brand.
here's a good guide for PSUs in every price range

 

[Diresu]

UPDATE: New problem now on top of everything else. I was extracting a rather large file(5 gigs) and while I know it should take some time, it took about 90 minutes. While it was extracting, i couldn't really do anything else either since it would be super slow...

Same issue when installing the extracted file, installation took over an hour. This doesn't seem right...

Any ideas?

 

[DragonMaster]

Something is slowing down your computer. Are you sure it's not overheating? (Dust, etc.)

 

[KingCody]

it doesn't sound like an overheating problem to me.. it sounds like Diresu's hard drive is fragmented, that's all.

windows does a good job a fragmenting files. it puts them in whatever space is available regaurdless of it's locastion on the disk. if the drive is fragmented, then moving large files will be a very time consuming process because the drive has to keep "jumping" around to find the data instead of getting it all in one place

 

[DragonMaster]

When my comps overheat (~ 52*C and up for all of them) they start to get slower and do things wrong.

Defragmenting should help too. Maybe there's a lot of temp files, etc.
A little CCleaner job should help.

Oh, and is his P4 the kind to underclock when temps get too high?

 

[Diresu]

Thanks guys, ill try a defrag and see how it goes. Overheating I don't think is the issue. Though its something to keep an eye on. It shouldn't be considering I have a huge fan on the cpu at least.

 

[KingCody]

temp files aren't really the issue.

when you "delete" a file in windows, it doesn't actually delete anything. it simply marks that space on the disk as "free". so when a new file is created, it writes over the old files which have been marked as "free space". the problem is that this "free space" is scattered all over the drive. so when a large file is written, it is also scattered all over the drive.

defragmenting a drive should be done on a monthly or bi-weekly basis for best performance. if it is done as routine, then it will not be as time consuming of a task (the defrags will finish alot sooner)

with older pentiums, the CPU would downclock alot to reduce it's heat output. I'm not sure if newer models still do that, but modern motherboards will shut the system down if the CPU overheats. but i'm not an intel guy so i'm not sure about that.

 

[Diresu]

Is there any programs out there that can give me a heat monitor readout on a regular basis without having to go through the BIOS ? I looked around and couldn't find anything except hardware attachements.

 

[KingCody]

there are software based programs such as speedfan and motherboard monitor, but they are not accurate. they will help with before/after comparisons, but that's about it.

if you want real time temp monitoring, you should get a hardware based temp probe/display. although they are not 100% accurate either, they are much better than software based programs

 

[Diresu]

Ah, ill look into getting one then. Slowdown is getting pretty annoying. On a diff note i checked the fragmantation on my c: and its about 60% using the windows defrag utility. Should I use somethin else or does it not make a difference?