Thread: DVD Burner Caused Lag

Beginning last week 2142 started to lag out about every 10-15 seconds going from 70-80FPS down to 5-10FPS. At first I thought it was my connection or the server but no one else was experiencing an issue and my ping was my standard 8-10 .

In addition to the lag I would get the occasional BSOD. I thought to myself, "well maybe it is just time to do a rebuild". It had been about 3 months since my last one so I figured that it wouldn't hurt since i wanted my system to be good to go for the June 2142 match that happened last Saturday. So bright and early this last Saturday morning I rebuilt the system, cleaned it out, and reloaded everything. Needless to say I opened Pandora's box of PC issues.

The system was still BSOD'ing, lagging out in 2142, and now windows would hang after the initial XP load screen 90% of the time. Murphy came knocking as I had to leave my PC to do things around the house and didn't get back to my system till about 6pm that night and with the match starting @ 8 I was getting a bit frustrated.

After 2 hours of unloading/ reloading drivers, running memory and drive tests I conceded and had to join up. I was able to play thru 2 hours with only 1 BSOD but the lag was killing me. The only reason i stayed on was because I didn't want to leave the team i was on a man short. Once the match was over I bailed.

So the next day I returned to my system to tackle the problem. I started swapping memory, disconnecting drives, resetting bios settings but to no avail. I started to think it was my vid card since the system would boot in safe mode or with the vid drivers unloaded. That would have sucked since I would have to RMA my 8800 and then explain to my wife why I spent 500.00 @ Frys for another one because I am to impatient to wait for the replacement and couldn't be without my system for 2 weeks.

But then I thought back to another time years ago when the CD drive was the cause of instability to the system. So i pulled the DVD drive and BAM, Windows was booting normally each time, no BSOD's, and all system errors disappeared. So I grabbed an old emprex drive from my parts horde and installed it so that I could bring of 2142 to test if the lag disappeared as well. It did! So not wanting to leave an old drive in my system and too impatient to wait for one to be shipped from NewEgg I grabbed the ol' wallet and headed to BestBuy around the corner to pick up a new drive.

Problem solved. I am posting this just to vent (since my wife has the deer in the headlights look whenever I geek speak to her) and maybe help someone avoid hours of troubleshooting their system.

No, I didn't think to adjust the access type mainly because it was running fine for quite some time previously and by default it is on. I have had the drive in this particular system for about 6 months now (drive is about 10 months old) and never had problems up until last week. Good point though!

I did put the drive in another known good system and kablooey (tech term, feel free to use), system issues. Verified bad drive.