Problems With Screensavers

At the end of March, I purchased an i9300 with a pentium M 1.86GHz and 1 gig of RAM. (I'm amazed at this baby - what she can do!!!) My system is XP Home, Service Pack 2. My video card is the NVidia GeForce Go 6800.
I don't know how much of this info is applicable but, there you go...I'm running the computer with a screen resolution of 1680 X 1050 using the 32 bit colour setting. Almost invariably, I run the computer with its AC adapter.

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased some 3D screensavers from two different online companies - www.astrogemini.com and www.oceandive.com .

All of the screensavers that I have look very good but run somewhat hesitantly. They freeze a bit a few times then continue and then they freeze a couple of times for longer periods (one or two seconds) and then continue again smoothly until the same freeze sequences starts again. It's sort of like listening to a CD in your car and hitting a bump on the road and the CD stops playing for a few seconds. When the CD starts again, the song continues but with the few seconds music lost, that is it begins that few seconds later in the song.

I've been in contact with the screensaver companies. All their suggestions have been to no avail. We tried DxDiag, we found nothing wrong. We tried installing the latest version of the NVidia video card from Dell's website (77.72) with no improvements. We tried screensavers from other sites - the same problem persisted.

I checked my computer's display settings and everything is pretty well at the default settings (note, I tried a lower resolution and a 16 bit colour setting but that didn't help so I reset them).

I hope that this info helps as I've done as much as I can figure out what to do in these matters.

 

Does this happen with the normal XP Screensaver? Also, have you updated all of your drivers and XP home updates?

 

Yeah, there is absolutely NO reason that they shouldn't be running smoothly, so it's probably a driver issue. I don't know what all the possible settings are for the Go6800, but it should be smooth, regardless. I am have the 128Mb x300 and my 3d screensaver runs smooth as silk.

 

I have Media Center edition and it too did some odd things especially coming out of the screen saver. There is a new driver for the 6800 which seems to help somewhat. Also remember that the screen savers generally run at a low priority so if something else is going on that may be a little jerky as they will not get a slice. Check if there is an option to run ar normal priority.

 

1. If, by XP Screensaver, you mean 'Flower Box, Pipes, Flying Objects, Starfield,' etc, yes, the same problem happens there too.

2. If, by updating all of my drivers, you mean the video card driver (NVidia 6800), yes, I did through Dell's support site. The 6800 driver is dated June 2005. I don't know which other drivers need to be updated for this purpose.

3. If, by updating XP home, you mean just that, I think so because I'm on automatic update (in Control Panel/Security Center).

By the way, when I googled Windows Updates, one of the sites was this thing called 'Error Nuker' (rated 'Top 5' by Download.com???). It's supposed to check my Windows Registry. I tried it and it 'found' 117 errors in a variety of Registry sites (File extensions, Com/ActiveX, Shortcuts, etc...) Then it suggests that I freely fix those errors with the same program to bring my 'system back to its original state'. I haven't done it yet because I don't know what that'll really do.

Anyway, 'Error Nuker' aside, I think I've answered your questions. Thank you for your input so far.

Northern Ontario Guy

 

Thank you for your suggestions.

With regards to the new 6800 driver, I already downloaded file R100022.EXE which is the most recent driver.

As to the other things,

1. I turned everything off (except for the wi-fi connection) and still it did the same stuff.

2. I don't understand what you mean by "Check if there is an option to run ar normal priority", especially 'ar'.

Thank you also for your suggestions.

 

i think JJD meant "run at normal priority". I'm thinking its probably software related...something isn't letting your screensaver run smoothly. Do you still have all of the junk software like AOL and stuff on there or did you do a clean install?

By the way, Thanks for those links, I just got me a couple of screen savers from there...the graphic is amazing.

 

The aquarium screen saver which comes with the MCE is quite nice.

As far as the hesitation, do you see the disk drive light come on when there are pauses. If so lack of memory may be a problem also and what you are seeing is simply the result of page faults.

 

I don't know what 'run at normal priority' means but I'll try to find out.

No, I haven't done a clean install yet. I'm sort of frightened of doing it myself because I've done some stuff like that in the past (with previous computers) and have had to be rescued by my son-in-law. I don't want to be running to him with that kind of thing another time. Maybe I'll pay someone to do it properly for me.

Thanks again.


Michel

 

Hi!

Well, first of all thanks for the help. Your ideas didn't work but that's ok.

I eventually fixed it myself in a rather inadverdent manner. I happened upon some info for a program called ERROR NUKER. There's a freebee partial nuke tryout. So, I tried it out as a curiosity. Later, when the screensavers kicked on again, there was only a minimal freeze/skip incidence. So, I bought the whole version and totally nuked my errors and the screensavers run like a dream.

I'm not promoting this thing as such but it removed some 150 errors (application path, uninstall, help file, file extension, file extension reference, font files, most recently used files, shared DLLs, shared folders, startup programs, COM/ActiveX, browser helper objects & shortcuts).

So, again, thank you very much for your quick responses and offers of help. It's encouraging to be part of this family.

God bless you all.