Mouse Freezes, Recovers During CD access

[mdcrawford]

I'm running XP SP2. My PC has an IDE 52x CD/RW drive.

With just one particular CD that everyone else in the office can read
fine, my mouse freezes for a couple minutes at a time, but then
recovers. That is, the computer doesn't crash (not right away), but
I/O is locked out.

I managed to open the performance monitors in the task manager, and it
looks like this:

....|...|...|...|...

The spikes in the CPU activity occur while the mouse is frozen, and the
mouse moves normally during the quiescent periods.

The CD is the Visual Studio 6 installer. I thought I might be able to
carry out an installation anyway, if slowly, so I managed to launch
Setup and get it started. But I eventually got a blue screen with an
error message about an error in paging.

What could be wrong? How can I diagnose it? I don't even know where
to look. I'm an expert with computers, so you can tell me technical
things, but I'm not an expert with computers, and I haven't used
Windows XP much.

I'm pretty sure that it's my computer and not that the CD is defective.
Everyone else in the office can read the CD just fine. I just did a
bunch of software installations as I'm a new employee where I work.
Possibly I installed something incompatible or buggy.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Mike Crawford
(e-mail address removed)

Read "GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks" at:
http://www.goingware.com/tips/

 

[Guest]

If you have a tech I would have him try another cd-rom drive. This way you
will know right away if its the issue. Do other cds have problems with the
drive?

If you dont have a tech then try copying the entire cd to a new directory on
the hard drive. Then start the install from in that directory. This may get
you by the error so you can at least use the software untill the problem is
fixed. You will have to make sure that you have "show hidden fles and
folders" selected under your folder options.

The Woodpile