2Tired2Tango
Tech Monkey
When your Win2000, XP or Vista machine is idle...
Does your HD light flash once a second but there is no disk access?
Does your DVD Burner make unexplained clicking sounds?
Does the hourglass cursor pop up unexpectedly from time to time?
Does the cursor show the little CD symbol with no disk in the drive?
And/Or...
Do your movies and music sometimes hesitate or burble?
Do your games hesitate for no explainable reason?
Do downloads pause or certain websites fail to load?
Something is freezing the system, only occasionally, and just long enough to cause problems. I've been all over the web looking for solutions and, well, nobody seems to have any idea what's causing it, so I got busy and started trying to track it down myself.... Took a while but here's what I found...
Back in the Win95 days the system had to poll the CDRom drive (no hardware signaling) to know if there was a disk inserted, so it could look for *.CDA files and launch the CD Player.
All well and good but with today's systems, there is hardware signaling that does a much better job of it. (Shell Hardware Detection)
But, in it's infinite wisdom Microsoft continues to poll CD and DVD drives anyway. Once a second: "Are we there yet?"... "No". (Shrek would be so annoyed!) The hitch is that most modern ODDs don't handle this kind of software polling very well and can be quite slow to respond, especially if the tray is open... Why say "no" if the answer might be "Yes" in a second or two?
On some motherboards this polling activity goes unnoticed, on others it causes the HDD light to flash for a split second, once a second, regular as clockwork. Not only does this tie up the disk interface --hense the interference with video and audio buffering-- it ties up the I/O subsystem --which includes networking-- waiting for a response. On some Motherboards it will prevent the machine from entering standby.
Ok so, now we know what it is... here's the fix...
What you have just done is to disable the old style Auto Run features at the global level. Tools like Tweak UI and others only do this on a per-user basis. This should not interfere with the new style Shell Hardware Detection scheme as it is based on hardware signaling, not software polling.
Hopefully the problem should be gone... it worked for me on three different systems.
Does your HD light flash once a second but there is no disk access?
Does your DVD Burner make unexplained clicking sounds?
Does the hourglass cursor pop up unexpectedly from time to time?
Does the cursor show the little CD symbol with no disk in the drive?
And/Or...
Do your movies and music sometimes hesitate or burble?
Do your games hesitate for no explainable reason?
Do downloads pause or certain websites fail to load?
Something is freezing the system, only occasionally, and just long enough to cause problems. I've been all over the web looking for solutions and, well, nobody seems to have any idea what's causing it, so I got busy and started trying to track it down myself.... Took a while but here's what I found...
Back in the Win95 days the system had to poll the CDRom drive (no hardware signaling) to know if there was a disk inserted, so it could look for *.CDA files and launch the CD Player.
All well and good but with today's systems, there is hardware signaling that does a much better job of it. (Shell Hardware Detection)
But, in it's infinite wisdom Microsoft continues to poll CD and DVD drives anyway. Once a second: "Are we there yet?"... "No". (Shrek would be so annoyed!) The hitch is that most modern ODDs don't handle this kind of software polling very well and can be quite slow to respond, especially if the tray is open... Why say "no" if the answer might be "Yes" in a second or two?
On some motherboards this polling activity goes unnoticed, on others it causes the HDD light to flash for a split second, once a second, regular as clockwork. Not only does this tie up the disk interface --hense the interference with video and audio buffering-- it ties up the I/O subsystem --which includes networking-- waiting for a response. On some Motherboards it will prevent the machine from entering standby.
Ok so, now we know what it is... here's the fix...
Code:
Click "Start" ...
Select "Run"
Type [B]regedit[/B]
Click OK
In Regedit follow the tree to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SYSTEM
CurrentControlSet
Services
Cdrom
In the right hand pane double click "AutoRun"
Set it's value to 0 (zero)
Click OK.
Close Regedit
Reboot your system.What you have just done is to disable the old style Auto Run features at the global level. Tools like Tweak UI and others only do this on a per-user basis. This should not interfere with the new style Shell Hardware Detection scheme as it is based on hardware signaling, not software polling.
Hopefully the problem should be gone... it worked for me on three different systems.
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