HDD issues!?

[madmonk888]

hey ive been troubled lately by some weird issues with my gaming experience...
ive just recently re-formatted and reinstalled windows because i switched mobo/cpu at first, ive installed certain games i always play, like halflife 2 and everquest2, and they ran just fine, as time progressed, ive installed more games on the HDD, and uninstalled others, of course always defragging, mustava defragged like .. 20 times.
but now , for example in halflife 2, it seems to lag when any sound or minor thing loads, like .. just a short lag, when a barrel blows up, or something like that , and i figured it must be from the Harddrive, since thats where all the files and sounds are loaded.. now .. does anyone else have this problem, or a way to solve it? im just not sure why all of a sudden when a barrel blows up, or anything like that happens i get a short lag
2 more things need to be mentioned
1) ive ran 3dmark03/05 when i first installed and now , score is relatively the same 5 points less or more
2) it didnt lag before when i first installed, so its not like its the graphics card or something

can defrag mess up harddrive if used too much?
also .. no spyware or shit like that .. i ran all the spyware programs
no hardware changes, checked cpu-z and its the same
if needed comp specs are in sig =D

thanks for future input =D

 

[Nubius]

Hmmmm.....hard to say really. How long have you had this hard drive? Your problems seem fairly common for a computer that's used frequently meaning installing and uninstalling things. I actually am removing and installing things almost daily and this indeed is a wear down on the system, but with you defragging everytime that should have kept it all nice and clean. Last time I defragged it was horribly fragmented but I wasn't getting any lagging like you've described. I've gotten lagging like that before, but never really troubleshooted it.

Have you tried memtest86+ to see if perhaps your RAM is getting any errors? If it is causing errors this would indeed probably cause that lag.

If no errors are found with memtest86+, you've defragged, checked for spyware, all that good stuff, then it doesn't seem like theres too much more you can do.

I've never heard of defragging too much messing up your HD per se, but it does of course make your HD work. So if you're running defrag a lot then you got your HD working quite a bit and this will indeed lesson the life of your hard drive....but who really knows what the lifespan of your HD really is? The manufacturer can say 50,000 Hours but yours might only last 20,000 for all you know, know what I mean?

 

[GeckoEcho421]

It's your sound card, there's been many reported problems on the forums at www.steampowered.com about creative labs sound cards causing short freeze ups.

 

[madmonk888]

hmm... maybe i should run audio from mobo see how it runs .. also ..geckotech, are you running Corsair XMS 1gb at 2-2-2-5 how it says in sig? because i can only get my HyperX to get 2.5-2-2-5, as soon as i switch the CAS latency to 2, it drops the FSB to half.. apparently AMD64 cant do that too well, i have the same processor and i have the K8T mobo.. maybe thats the difference