Big perormance & hard-disk issues

FrankGrimes

I'm running Vista Ultimate on my HTPC in the living room and use it mainly for web browsing, watching video files, and recording TV (2 NTL set-top boxes connected to my Hauppage 500 MCE TV Tuner card). I have a Core2Duo 4400 2.00 GHZ with 2GB RAM, a 500GB Samsung HDD and a 200 GB Samsung HDD. I have an Abit F-I90 HD mobo which has onboard Radeon 1250 gfx and I have this connected to my TV by HDMI and the audio output from the onboard sound goes to my Yamaha RX-V361 AV Receiver by optical cable.

Everything was working perfectly for a year, then a few weeks ago Media Center got stuck on recording a particular program - it shows the recording symbol for that program continuously and there's nothing I can do to stop it. Since then I've been getting 'Windows Critical Error/Issue' and hard-disk failure messages in Media Center and the general performance of the machine has dropped significantly with apps crashing quite frequently.

I thought it might be a hard-disk error so I ran the Check Disk utility which started a scan after restarting - I left this overnight but don't know where to find the results. Should there be a log file I can look up and what should I be looking for?
I started a disk defragment on the 500GB drive last night but it's still running. Unfortunately, my PC wasn't scheduling backups or recovery points and I stupidly turned off this feature on my Windows Home Server, though the server does have a backup of this PC that was taken in February if that might help.

Is there any other diagnostic tool out there I should look at?

Playing videos or DVDs in Media Center or VideoLAN player now has some noticeable lip sync issues (audio is heard before the action) - I'm guessing that has more to do with performance on the PC than the AV receiver, sound about right?

These problems are really rendering my PC pretty useless (at a time I need it most as I'm laid up recovering from surgery for a few weeks), so any advice or suggestions on how to sort this out are much appreciated. Thanks

yoyo

Run the official samsung HDUtil which is on ultimatebootcd.com, leave it running and if theres any dodgy stuff it'll let ya know

Nick

FrankGrimes

Thanks Nick, I downloaded the CD-ROm version (I don't have a floppy drive) from here and burned the ISO file to a CD, then restarted and tried to boot from that CD, but I got an error which I couldn't quite read (text cut-off at the side of the screen).

Then I downloaded the floppy-disk version and tried to execute that from the control panel (I don't have a floppy disk drive). I tried that for both versions (with Admin rights) but got an Abnormal process termination error as it's not designed for running from windows.

Any ideas on how I can get it going?

yoyo

Try hit enter at the boot off text It should load a menu and you can pick the diagnostic util from there,
Nick

FrankGrimes

Thx. I had misunderstood how that site worked - I downloaded only the specific HUtil app and that wasn't working. So now I've downloaded the whole Ultimate CD ISO and burned it to a CD.

Problem is now I'm not able to tell it to boot from CD at boot-time cos my bluetooth keyboard works in the BIOS but not on the boot screen when the 'Boot:' text appears. I'll try to get hold of another keyboard to see if that works at boot time. Likewise, I'll get an actual computer monitor hooked up to it to ensure I can read the full text. On crutches so will need to wait till the gf comes home to do a bit of lifting for me!

FrankGrimes

I got that working last night and used HUtil to do a full hard-drive scan including a full surface scan and the good news is there is no hardware issues.

Bad news is the problem is still there and the machine is still sluggish, but it would appear to be a software problem now. I'm looking into the error messages it's throwing up and seeing if I can find anything to fix it.

The main error is now 'Windows Media Center Receiver Service has stopped working' and I saw that listed as an specific bug that should have been fixed by Vista Service Pack 1, but I have that installed and no joy.

If I don't get a solution it looks like I might have to re-install but I'm not sure how to do that. Likewise, I do have a backup from February on my Windows Home Server, but I'm not sure how to use that for a faull re-install as opposed to just restoring certain folders.

Any suggestions for good maintenance/optimization software are much appreciated. That Ultimate Boot CD that yoyo pointed me to will surely come in handy in future so thanks for that.

yoyo

Have you updated your sound card/video card drivers also? They could help solve funny issiues like this if the hard disk is fine,

Nick

FrankGrimes

Hi Nick,

I went into Device Manager and selected Update Driver for each component and got it to search online - it came back saying the best driver for each device was already installed. Is that reliable or do I need to dig out model numbers and go to the manufacturer websites and download the latest versions to be sure?

It's early days yet, but it seems some of the things I have tried may have fixed the problems.