How to solve extreme DPC latency peaks (240.000µs)

Question

Once every few minutes I get a sudden peak of DPS latency that causes the system to "freeze" for a fraction of a second (240.000µs = 240ms).

The freeze is not only audio, also video, input devices, everything.

Is there any tool to check what is causing these "system chokes"? As I'm aware it may be caused by some faulty drivers or hardware. The problem started a few months ago.

Some relevant system info:

• It is 5 years old
• I bought a crappy USB keyboard recently because I accidentally melted the last one
• I started to let uTorrent open, and I noticed that the more time uTorrent is open, the more frequent the freezes are
• I started to use Maxivista
• Wired network
• I have 2 different size RAM (I had to buy a new one recently)

Answer 1

I used DPC checker once, it helps troubleshooting what device is causing problems. the only way to do this is by disabling suspicious devices one at a time (start by deleting the USB root hubs under Universal Serial Bus controller node in the device manager) and see if you get better results on the grapths.

Its also obvious when having this kind of issues to check for drivers updates.

Answer 2

LatencyMon displays which driver is causing the spikes.

In most cases, these spikes are due to graphics card or wireless drivers.

Try disabling all drivers (keep only the drivers needed to run the pc) and then enable one by one and check with LatencyMon.