HD light blinking causing 3D games to skip, I have 512 ram.

[rhombus]

Rebuit my comp at xmas with new mobo, CPU, and RAM to my sig below. Kept the HD,VID,CD,DVD, from prior system.
Clean win98se install.
Now, even when idel, my HD light has a faint blink to it. About every 3-6 sec.
This is with NO programs whatsoever loaded.
I cant tell it untill i run a 3d game, ecspecially during flybys, or rolling demos like the one in madonion.
Its just like Im low on memory and windows is accessing the cashe.
Remember playing Hexen II on that old P100 with 16 meg RAM?
OK its not accessing the hard drive THAT much, but it is noticable.
Actually, its getting more and more annoying.
How can i configure my system to stop accessing my hard drive for now apparent reason?

I have been building pentium systems for years and never had this problem.

[cjlax5]

im almost sure the prob is NOT your cpu, sound like some stupid setting that comes with win98, but i dont know exactly what it is

[Dark Illusion]

It's Win98 and their poor memory management. Having 512 or more will cause it to have out of memory errors.

[JigPu]

Well, just how much free RAM do you have? Open system monitor and check out how much free RAM you have, and how much of your swap file is being used.

JigPu

[PipeBom]

I was going to say that it could be a hard drive scaning program that keeps acessing the hard drive, but then I saw that you had an IBM hard drive. The early Segate Barracuda IV's had that problem.

[rhombus]

Here are my scores after a fresh boot and all progs killed but explorer and systray.

Kernel usage 1%
allocated mem 135m
locked mem 86m
unused physical mem 399m
disk cache size 70m
swap file in use 0m

Light still blnks every 2-5 sec.
I changed some memory settings in my system.ini file as described in one of the other forums here, but didnt help.
Tried unitstalling some of the VIA 4n1 drivers but that didnt help.

I might try taking out one of my sticks of 256 ram.
512 of mem is an overkill for what I do, but i thought i would be good to have when I go to a higher OS that sucks up more.

[Teacher_Doug]

suggest you check control panel/device manager..check all the HD drivers are ok, no dreaded yellow or red symbols

[PsycoPhreak]

Could be the "auto insert" option is enabled for your cd-rom, that will cause the IDE light to blink every few seconds as its doing a quick scan to see if a new cd was in fact inserted or one was removed, if you seem to be having trouble with it pausing frequently for a split second each time, you might want to try adding the following line to you SYSTEM.INI file under the "386 Enh" section:

ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

that will force windows to use any free memory available BEFORE it writes to the swapfile, and windows WILL write to the swapfile no matter how much memory is free if a large program is loaded (like a game)...windows memory manager sucks!

Also see if "syc data transfer" and "dma" are checked for the drives and cd-roms, that too can stop what your experiencing.


check out the link below to DL a great memory managing program, it's called "CACHEMAN" solves alot of the crap and problems the windows memory manager makes..

http://www.outertech.com

[rhombus]

Yep, ended up being the auto insert notif for my Toshiba 2x DVD.
Guess its age is starting to show with my newer parts -oldest part of my system.
Hard to upgrade something when it plays movies so well, but never use.