[This is a repost of my message of 8 February which did not get answered.]
About 3 months ago I bought a new Pentium D from Dell and transferred all my
apps from my old P4. Apart from the change from P4 to D, the only other
changes of significance were moving from XP Home SP2 to XP Prof SP2 and
upgrading Office 2000 to Office 2003.
From the very start of using the new machine, I got stuttering audio and
jerky video, and after some help from the Dell message board, this was
diagnosed as excessive levels of Deferred Procedure Calls due to out-of-date
video drivers. I upgraded these and the audio and video are now much
improved but the problem of DPC's has not gone away. For example, after
leaving the machine switched on unattended for 2 days recently, Process
Explorer reported that 47% of CPU time was being used by DPC's. Not
surprisingly, the machine was running very slowly!
I have done a little investigation and have discovered a Microsoft tool
called RATTV3 which helps analyse driver file performance and I have run this
for the last 36 hours. If I interpret the report correctly, this tells me
that the principal culprit in generating high levels of DPC's in excess of
1ms is ndis.sys. (Tcpip.sys also generates quite a lot but nothing like as
many as ndis.sys).
I do not know how to interpret the figures that RATT produces and I hope
that someone here will be able to. RATT shows that over the 36 hour
monitoring period ndis.sys generated nearly 30million DPC's, of which nearly
3 million were more than 1ms, 625,000 were more than 10ms and 113 were more
than 1 second.
Is this normal? Is this the source of the excessive DPC's? If it is, what
can I do about it? If it isn't, what might be the problem? My knowledge of
these things is pretty minimal at the best of times, and I am now way out of
my depth. I will be most grateful for any assistance that my be forthcoming.
Until then, I am rebooting every 24 hours!
Thanks in anticipation.
Robert
--
Dell Dimension 9100 Pentium D 2.80GHz
1GB RAM
Windows XP Prof SP2
Office 2003 / Project 2000
HDD1: 250GB Serial ATA
HDD2: 250GB SCSI
ATI Radeon X600 256MB
Soundblaster Live! 24-bit
McAfee V_Scan / P_Firewall
