Wacky Link Stutter Issue

[andrewg]

Just a weird observation, not a question.

One of my Link clients is an older Dell laptop. Despite its paltry CPU resources and crappy video card, I had gotten it working pretty well with Link - even for 1080i HD. Until I rebooted it the other day.

When it came back up, Link was stuttering. It would occur about every 2 to 3 minutes, each event lasting for 5-10 seconds. It would happen on every recording (HD or SD).

I tried everything I could think of, just about every suggestion I've seen posted on this board. I changed the codec, and fiddled with overlay vs 3D in every permutation. I shut off every service I could think of. I killed the pagefile, system restore, Automatic Updates. There is no AV software.

I changed the network cable, the switch port, the switch.

I restored the laptop to a fresh image, with bare minimum of software installed. I used process explorer to dig into running threads of the BTV interface. All I could see was that every couple minutes, CPU usage would spike to 100, causing the stutter. THen after a few seconds later it would settle back to around 70 percent (when viewing HD). THe BTV process was the one using all the resources.

Then I started monkeying with the settings.xml file, trying every permutation of the LinkPrecache, FirewallFilter, and LegacyMode settings that came with 4.7.1 BTV Link. Absolutely nothing made a difference.

When trying the last absolute last permutation of the three Link settings in settings.xml, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye right when a stutter was completing.

A warning light popped up on the laptop, indicating there was something wrong with the battery. The battery has been dead for months, and I've just been runnning with it plugged in. After a couple minutes of waiting, I disovered that indeed the stutter started right before the light starting blinking and continued until the warning light stopped.

I took out the battery, and the warning light stopped flashing (it only cares about a bad battery, not no battery apparently). And the stutter stopped. Everything works great again.

I have no idea why the stutter started happening after the reboot, because the warning light had been happening for months - and I didn't change anything before the reboot. Why did it start being a problem all of a sudden?

No clue, but at least it works again.

Anyway, I really doubt that this will apply to anyone else here, but it is a sad reminder that you really have to check everything when troubleshooting these things.

[mmberry]

Just for grins, in device manager under Hard Disk controllers, see if primary hard drive is in PIO or DMA.