Persisting Performance Issues

Zerker
Zerker Member Posts: 5 New User

Hello, hope you are having a nice day. I will try to cut this as short as possible:

 

I own an Acer 791G with:

Intel 4210H

GTX 860M

8 gigs of DDR3

No SSD

 

Bought it last year.

 

After using it for about a month I started experiencing huge FPS drops, lags, spikes and streaming videos having incredible amounts of visual/audio stutters. My problem was diagnosed as DPC Latency caused by a service called Intel Technology Access, disabling it solved it.

 

A few months later it appeared again, and no matter what I did, I could not solve it. I have been unable to play taxing games on this machine for 6-7 months. So here goes:

 

Symptoms are:

- Low performance in games. For example, I used to play World of Warcraft with above 60 FPS, now I do it around 20, sometimes less.

- Lag spikes in games. Some games, I have no idea why, don't suffer from any problems. For example, Tomb Raider still plays around 60 FPS, but suffers from a huge lag spike that lasts 5-6 seconds whenever a taxing scene suddenly appears out of nowhere, like an avalanche.

- Stutter and visual/audio lag is now spread from streaming videos to videos I already have stored in my computer. Though it is not as bad, I experience stutter and lag every 10 mins or so from Youtube videos, videos I have stored either never stutter, or stutter all the way from beginning to the end.

- Mouse lag while using Youtube on Microsoft Edge.

- Latency checker apps such as Latencymon report very high dpc latency, showing NDIS.SYS as the culprit. If the network adapter is disabled, then the audio driver is the culprit, if that is disabled, the video driver, and so on.

 

Solutions I have tried:

 

- Uninstalled and reinstalled all the device drivers from scratch. Eveything. Tried both old and new drivers.

- Made sure that my games were using the correct GPU from the Nvidia Control Panel.

- Searched for anything even remotely resembling Intel Technology Access, couldn't find it.

- Updated BIOS to the latest found in Acer support section.

- Increased fan speed through third party programs.

- Disabled all the devices in my PC one at a time to find which one was faulty.

- Tried the ethernet port and even a USB Wireless Adapter to connect to the webs.

- Tried disabling and uninstalling everything related to the webs.

- Memtest showed no issues.

- Scanned for viruses and such.

- Uninstalled all my anti-virus apps, tinkered with the Windows Firewall.

- Finally, to no avail, upgraded to Windows 10. Clean install.

 

 

Nothing worked. Nothing ever works. I haven't seen the slightest improvement(well, except when I increased the fan speed, seems like I have gained around 5-6 FPS in WoW - Low settings).

 

I am terrorized. I have heard that these machines have faulty network adapters that can cause this issue, but couldn't find a soul that knows what to do about it.

 

Please help me folks, you are my last remaining hope. My hobby time is precious, since I have an hour tops for it all day, and I'm sick and tired of this issue sabotaging it.

Answers