spoonsop

Hi everyone,

I do simple DV editing on my laptop, it's always been fine. However at the moment, everytime the hard drive is seriously accessed, everything else happening on the computer pauses. This happened to me once before, about a month ago. It gradually got worse and worse until I realised I should try defragementing the drive which fixed the problem right up. (I couldn't even play an mp3 without it breaking up everytime I switched to another program, cauing the disk to access.)

Well, right now I have a DV-project to edit, but I can't even play back my source material DV clips on their own in windows media player or winamp because they literally craw along, several frames at a time. The sound is also broken up like crazy. I ran the CPU monitor and it reports 80% usage whilst attempting to play the video. Not only that, but as I move the mouse around on screen during video playback, it stutters along with the video, and jumps across the screen where the path cannot be shown because the computer is too caught up loading off the disk. (I presume).

Well, I'm clueless what to do now... I ran disk defragmentor all last night for 12 hours hopeing this morning I'd come back to a more sane computer, but no.

specification: AthlonXP 2ghz, 1.25Gb Ram, Ati graphics (forget which 9000?), WinXP home, 12gb free space, PageFile usage: 189Mb

I tried running a racing game a few moment ago to see if there were any stuttering problems with that. The game played just fine (sound and graphics) however during the actual loading of the level, there is some background music normally. This time the background music stuttered badly along as the level loaded.

Should I be looking out for some better defragment tool? Or does my problem lie elsewhere? (XP's fragment tool says my system does not need defragmenting again, although after clicking the analyze button to see a visual of my drive, there are still a few red fragmented parts. It brought up a list of fragmented files too. A few of these were big DV-video files which are over 1gb in size (not used for the project i currently want to edit) and some other smaller files are fragmented too. One file which sounds strange to me is c:\windows\system32\config\system.LOG (file size 1kb, fragments 214) - surely such a small system file as this wouldn't be fragmented? Or at least would be sorted out during the defragement process?

I initially realised this whole computer problem yesterday when I hooked up my DV camcorder and tried to capture some DV video. It captured incredibly jerky dropping frames and audio like mad. So then I tried simple video playback and it was the same.

I don't really want to do a HDD reformat because I just have TOO MANY programs installed with custom settings, plugins etc. And the whole system is completely the way I like it. It's a nightmare to set it all back up the way I want it again each time, especially with drivers etc.

Also, when I run disk defragmenter I do it in safemode, so it's uninterrupted.

Thanks for your time - obviously any help or suggestions you can offer will be very appreciated! There's nothing worse than having a deadline looming for a project and something stupid gets in the way.