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[Ferrio]

This is a reaccurring problem that happens to my PC. Every once and awhile for some reason all my games will decided to start pausing/unpausing every 3 seconds or so. The only way I've ever figured out how to fix it is to reformat and reinstall my OS. I'm curious if anyone else has run into this problem and knows how to fix it.



It's not my hardware, games work perfectly fine all the time. Then suddenly their shot to hell until I reformat.

 

[Sinatar]

I had this exact same problem. There is a setting for your hard drive called DMA, basically every harddrive/cd-rom is DMA compatible for the last like 10 years, but for some dumbass reason the folks who put together my PC didn't have it on, it was such an obvious fix that I didn't think to look for it.

To check if you have DMA enabled:

1) Right click on "My Computer" and click properties
2) Go to the hardware tab and click "Device Manager"
3) You want to find your Primary IDE controller so look for an item with something similar to "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers".
4) Double click your "Primary IDE Channel", go to the "Advanced settings" tab and see what the "Current transfer mode" for device 0 is. If it says PIO then DMA isn't enabled. To enable it click on the "transfer mode" drop down and select "DMA if available". Then go back to the device manager screen, right click on the primary IDE channel and remove it. Reboot windows and when it restarts, it will reinstall your IDE channel with DMA enabled.

That should clear it up, you can check your secondary IDE channel as well, thats usually the CD ROM. Enabling it should give it better performance.

Of course if DMA is already active, then I have no idea what the issue could be.

 

[hirokazu]

shouldn't DMA be enabled by default anyhow when you install Windows and stuff - meaning you'd have to manually switch it off for it to be disabled? that is, unless Windows doesn't detect your hardware properly.

 

[Sinatar]

shouldn't DMA be enabled by default anyhow when you install Windows and stuff - meaning you'd have to manually switch it off for it to be disabled? that is, unless Windows doesn't detect your hardware properly.

Mine was set to "use DMA if available" yet PIO was still on, I had to manually remove the IDE channel to fix it. It worked like a charm.

 

[Ferrio]

This is not the issue.

 

[Vlad]

Have you tried defragmenting? I have that problem in BF1942 every so often, and a defrag usually clears it right up.

Checked for stuff running in the background?

 

[Ferrio]

Well it usually only works in certain games, I think only Direct X games.