uTorrent possibly causing high (50%) cpu usage for hardware interrupts

[Puttanesca]

I have noticed this problem recently and it only seems to happen when uTorrent is running.

Every few minutes there is a performance drop on y system. Process explorer shows a jump in hardware interrupts using cpu time which coincides with a uTorrent i/o spike.

I'm not sure where to go in trouble shooting this problem.

My system is a core Duo 2.66GHz with 3.25GB Ram available to windows XP v 2002 sp2.

I have a couple of sATA drives.

I don't seem to have any relevant entries in the event logger. System used to run uTorrent constantly in the background with no noticeable performance hit.

Does this sound like it could be related to uTorrent? Any pointers for trouble shooting this would be welcomed.

[Firon]

Why aren't you on SP3?

And it wouldn't surprise me if your HDDs have dropped into PIO transfer mode. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472 Try going to the Workaround section here and try it out (uninstall all drive controllers, then reboot).

[Puttanesca]

Okay, looks like this wasn't so much an issue with uTorrent as a driver issue which showed up with iTorrent hitting the disks regularly.

Thanks Firon, that seems to have made a big difference.

Its been a long time since I restarted this machine so it may have been something else; mind you anything disk related seems to be snappier now.

Is there a way to see if a sATA driver is using DMA in the device manager? (It doesn't seem to show it for sATA drives the way it does for regular old IDE drivers).