Poor performance on media playback

Alanmelon · 13-07-2008, 19:05

I've been having some issues with my Vaio laptop when playing some mp3s, videos, and embedded flash videos. Performance seems to take a nose dive, playback stutters and slows, reminiscent of an old 386 I had 10 years ago when trying to play mp3s. I've also noticed occasions when CPU usage seems to increase, movement of the mouse pointer slows and stutters as well. Examination of Task Manager confirms increased CPU activity but doesn't show any process responsible for it. Virus and spyware scans all negative.

Any ideas?

bopdude · 14-07-2008, 00:04

A corrupt codec or media player driver ? have you tried playing anything in a different player VLC for arguments sake ?

ZrByte · 14-07-2008, 07:43

Sounds more like DMA is disabled on the hard drive and/or CDROM to me. What OS / System spec do you have?
EDIT:
Or possibly even over aggressive power management settings.

Alanmelon · 14-07-2008, 08:09

Thanks for the replies so far. Spec is as follows;

Intel (Centrino) Core 2 Duo T5450@1.66 GHz
2Gig RAM
Mobile Intel X3100 Graphics

Running Vista Home Premium SP1

Things were ok originally, I'm not sure what has been changed to cause this problem.

**Graham M** · 14-07-2008, 08:12

Do the graphics drivers appear to be working correctly?

ZrByte · 14-07-2008, 14:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alanmelon

Thanks for the replies so far. Spec is as follows;

Intel (Centrino) Core 2 Duo T5450@1.66 GHz
2Gig RAM
Mobile Intel X3100 Graphics

Running Vista Home Premium SP1

Things were ok originally, I'm not sure what has been changed to cause this problem.

Considering the level of your hardware and since you're running Vista I doubt it is the DMA problem I suggested earlier, though it could still be the over aggressive power management I suggested, if you click on the battery icon on your taskbar what mode does it say it is currently running in? (Options are normally High performance, Balanced and Power Saver)
Also like Graham M says above, are your graphics drivers working correctly? have you updated them recently? If I remember correctly the Intel Graphics chipsets are still only partially supported in Vista, most only give a performance index score of 1.0 even thought they are considerably faster. If you have updated did you use intels own drivers or direct from the manufacturers website?

Alanmelon · 15-07-2008, 09:10

I've been looking into this some more. None of the drivers have been modified, but it now seems that the problem lies with very heavy CPU usage when streaming or downloading anything. I'm downloading a zip file at the moment and usage has peaked to 99%, so I'm guessing the same occurs when streaming a flash video which is what causes the slowdown and stutter. The process responsible seems to be listed as System - NT Kernel and System - see attached screenshot.

Alanmelon · 15-07-2008, 21:33

Managed to narrow the problem down to AVG Anti Virus Web Shield. After I disabled that all is well again.

homealone · 15-07-2008, 21:42

Thanks for that feedback, I don't use it myself, but AVG seems to have caused a few problems, recently

bopdude · 19-07-2008, 10:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by homealone

Thanks for that feedback, I don't use it myself, but AVG seems to have caused a few problems, recently

Very true, my son had problems on his pc due to avg, uninstalled it and put NOD32 on instead, problem sorted