Denise_M,
I applaud your sensible method of posting the entire list of information that I requested, doing it all in one screen-shot. Thanks.
"Some" of your problem with video playback is illustrated in the relative small amount of Free Space on various of your drives.
In the "old days" of Hard Drives under 100GB it was thought that disk performance began to degrade after reaching 50% capacity and became quite noticeable when dipping below 25% capacity Free Space.
With the size of Hard Drives you have, those old standards don't apply, but you can still fill a Hard Drive to full, particularly if you are running applications from the Hard Drive. Simply accessing media data from the Hard Drive requires much less Free Space, but you still need to have sufficient Free Space to accommodate occasional Defragmenting.
You are correct to recognize that being so full inhibits de-fragmenting utility.
It's also true that during use, your machine reads, and then writes back various pieces of the media, and not necessarily in the same location from which it was originally read, thereby increasing disk defragmentation.
The process of displaying various utilities and videos requires information to be read from the hard drive. If the HD is terribly fragmented, that requires the hard drive to be involved in a long interval of "seeking" the next file fragment, and then on and on with perhaps the "seek" portion of seek-read-write taking up more time than the actual read-write. Your experience of "choppy" and "slow" could be influenced significantly by the amount of fragmentation of each drive.
Interestingly, your practice of copy/pasting files between the various externals may serve to "decrease" fragmentation.
If for instance you had a completely empty external HD, and you copy/pasted files from an existing HD, each file would be sought out and read from the old fragmented HD as one continuous file, and laid down (written) in one continuous location. Each successive file would have the same experience of being read as a continuous sequence and placed contiguously on the fresh HD no matter how fragmented it source was, resulting in a near completely defragmented storage drive. That would be a good thing.
Please tell me, in the first illustration attached to Post #1
http://forums.whatthetech.com/index.php?s=…st&p=497006
Are all the programs sourced from the same drive, or might they be saved (located) on more than one drive.
The screens are:
Programs
HD Tune 2.54
Drive Speed Checker
If, for instance, HD Tune 2.54 is being called from Drive X:\ and Drive Speed check is being called from Drive Y:\
Then your Graphic Adapter may be experiencing a "bottle-neck" as each of those two programs attempt to provision their graphic display
The result would appear as you captured it in the screen-shot, but not necessarily as a fault of your Graphics Card, but rather as a result of two or more streams of information using the same conduits and caches to arrive to the Graphics Card and then being forwarded to the Display Monitor as partially formed images. Gamers call that "lag" and it even can happen from a single source of for instance online gaming when the image is complex and rapidly changing. The "lag" could also be worse if you were "running" the application program from same drive from which you were calling the image file.
_____________________-
For your external HD's you state that you connect various USB Hubs. I presume that these are "powered" hubs with external power supply.
You mention that you have most trouble when conducting copy/paste from more than one external drive to separate locations.
USB can be a real "stickler" when it comes to rate of transmission.
You will do better if all of your USB devices are of the same transmission type.
from:
http://www.everythingusb.com/usb_hubs.html
Installing a USB hub is simply a job of connecting the hub itself, AC adapter and USB cable, but if you already have a mix of Hi-Speed USB and classic USB devices, getting them to coexist could be a challenge. The reason is that two isochronous devices (real-time video & audio) can already saturate the classic speed bus. If you need a couple of different classic USB devices to operate simultaneously, multi-transaction translator USB hubs are crucial as they allocate dedicated 12Mbps bandwidth
It "may" be useful for you to tell us more about your various USB hubs and the USB or fire-wire extensions that are connected to them.
some combinations may work better than others and that may relate to the problem you are experiencing.
________________________
I noticed your work at another site, where you were looking for Drivers for your VGA MSI NX8400GS-TD256EH 8400GS RT Video Card.
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsg…p;sloc=&p=1
In that thread, you mentioned that if you cannot find a particular driver, you would intend to simply ignore and not install it.
That may be OK if you have a previous version installed and the fresh driver is simply a difficult to locate updated driver.
But you will, I think need a driver for every device you have connected to your machine, whether supplied by MS XP 64 edition installation disk or from the Device manufacturer. Be sure to use drivers that are consistent with XP 64bit version.
Have you had a look at your Device Manager?
Are there any Yellow or Red warning signs?
The above "explanations and descriptions" are not intended to be precisely and technically specific. Instead, I am trying to communicate in common terms for better understanding. Not only that, but this situation has me at the limit of my own technical understanding. I apologize to you and other readers, if my presentation is less technically exact than what you were looking for.
Please keep us posted with your progress.
Best Regards
