If your Windows system’s performance suddenly degrades badly, read this
If your Windows system performance suddenly becomes really bad without any explanation, continue reading this.
I spent weeks trying to figure out why my laptop’s performance suddenly became really bad without any explanation. Hitting Google continue to returned the typical stuff of “you may have malware” or viruses or whatnot, which that was not the case for me.
I installed Process Explorer, a tool written by super Windows guru Mark Russinovich (today an architect at Microsoft and the one who uncovered the Sony Rootkit debacle) and his company Systernals (once an Austin-based company) now owned by Microsoft. In any case, Process Explorer kept showing CPU utilization varying from 40% to 100% by the “process” hardware interrupts.
So I kept tweaking my Google search. Suddenly I found a blog post by Jim Holmes that pointed to a Microsoft article titled IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur:
“After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check (CRC) errors, the driver reduces the communications speed (the transfer mode) from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode to lower DMA modes in steps. If the driver continues to receive time-out or CRC errors, the driver eventually reduces the transfer mode to the slowest mode (PIO mode).”
From Jim Holmes’s article:
“Check the problem by examining the controller’s Primary and Secondary IDE settings: Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> Primary or Secondary IDE Channel -> Properties -> Advanced Settings. Look at the Current Transfer Mode field. If it’s “PIO” then it’s a FUBAR PITA and you’ll need to uninstall the driver, reboot and let XP do its magic reinstall.
So I did, and my I/O mode was set to PIO! I removed the driver, rebooted, checked the mode again, and it is back to Ultra-DMA. And better, the performance of the system is back to where it was — no more sluggish mouse movement, or system freezing for a couple of seconds, or super slow when going to Hibernate, and no more crazy high CPU utilization. Neat. Thanks to Jim…
Next is to find out why the hard drive is getting a number of errors or time-outs, and I hope the hard drive is not going bad, so I will run more checks… and I’ll make sure all my important data is backed up…
ceo
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Ash Haque
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Your HDD is definitely on it’s way out. Mine did this a 2 months back and I ignored the PIO error, reverted back to Ultra DMA and continued on my merry much faster way, congratulating myself for solving the problem.
Until one-day my laptop just stopped booting altogether, I could only boot in safe mode and even then I kept getting the blue screen of death. I had to buy a new HDD, and reinstall everything. I also had to buy an external 2.5″ drive holder in an attempt to recover everything critical, thank I god I succeeded!
My advice is run a scan disk (Right click C: - properties - tools - error checking) and see what comes up. If there are any errors I would back-up the HDD and go and buy a new one. Its a horrible experience when your drive crashes and not something I would wish on anyone. The worst thing in this case is it’s extremely sudden with no warning, well there is one warning the HDD gogin into PIO mode! Head that warning and don’t take your chances…
Good luck!
Antony
wow, i just got a headache reading that.
i have same problem with high cpu usage.this occur after instal driver for my pcie gforce7300 vga card.no updated driver solve this problem(getting worse).when in safe mode its no problems.some body help me?
sory for my bad english.
Let’s assume for a second the cause is slow I/O because a driver is in PIO mode. Go to device manager, and go by all devices, one by one, and see if you find the one in PIO mode, or if you are sure it is the video driver, remove it, and see if the problem goes away (the video will default to low resolution probably w/ default driver).
ceo