[Salil Surendran]

Hello Friends,
All of a sudden any kind of videos, of any format and run on any player have become slow on my Windows XP machine. I used to able to run two movies on my Dell Laptop but now even when I run one movie the movie stalls. I can see my CPU peaks to 90-100% and then the movies starts to stall. However, the player itself is only using 50% of the CPU the rest is used by 'System' process. If i pause the movie the CPU usage goes down and then after some time of resuming it will go up again to 100% and start stalling. My memory is less than 20% used and there is no disk trashing? Any solutions, this issue occurs with all media players, FLVPlayer, Windows Media Player, Quicktime player.

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Hello welcome to GeeksToGo, We will be happy to help you.

We will need some more information

If this is a name brand system:
Make
Model
Operating System
Age of the computer
Memory Total
Hard Drive Size, How much free space



If this is custom then We will need the following:

The CPU brand and model
The Motherboard brand and model
Ram amount and speed
Cd\Dvd rom interface IDE/
Hard Drive size and free space
Any cards in PCI slots

In Addition please supply:

Any software installed\updated and driver updates done just before problem started.
Any hardware installed\updated prior to problem starting.

All this will help in determining a course of action to best correct the problem you are experiencing.

[rshaffer61]

Hello welcome to GeeksToGo, We will be happy to help you.

We will need some more information

If this is a name brand system:
Make
Model
Operating System
Age of the computer
Memory Total
Hard Drive Size, How much free space



If this is custom then We will need the following:

The CPU brand and model
The Motherboard brand and model
Ram amount and speed
Cd\Dvd rom interface IDE/
Hard Drive size and free space
Any cards in PCI slots

In Addition please supply:

Any software installed\updated and driver updates done just before problem started.
Any hardware installed\updated prior to problem starting.

All this will help in determining a course of action to best correct the problem you are experiencing.

[Salil Surendran]

Wow. Thank you so much for the really fast reply(under 2 mins from the original post). My Laptop is Dell 9100 Inspiron with 2.8GHz CPU, 2 GB Ram. 15GB+ HD Free space and is 3 years old. I don't remember any kind of software updates that would have caused the problem to occur. The funny thing even when the CPU is not peaking the video seems to stall. Memory is just 30% and no hard disk thrashing. Even when the CPU hits 100% just running a single movie shouldn't cause a 2.8 GHz to peak to 100% from 0% and then cause the video to stall. The rest of the apps seems to be pretty fast.

[rshaffer61]

Please download ATF Cleaner by Atribune.
Double-click ATF-Cleaner.exe to run the program.
Under Main choose: Select All
Click the Empty Selected button.
If you use Firefox browserClick Firefox at the top and choose: Select All
Click the Empty Selected button.
NOTE: If you would like to keep your saved passwords, please click No at the prompt.
If you use Opera browserClick Opera at the top and choose: Select All
Click the Empty Selected button.
NOTE: If you would like to keep your saved passwords, please click No at the prompt.
Click Exit on the Main menu to close the program.
For Technical Support, double-click the e-mail address located at the bottom of each menu.

If this does not work then:

Go to
Start>>My Computer>>Right Click On 'C" drive>>Properties
Click on Tools tab at the top
In the Error Checking field click Check Now

When that is done
In Defragmentation field click Defragment Now



Reboot and let me know how system is running now

[Salil Surendran]

Nope. Didn't work. Even though ATF removed 1.6 GB of junk. What next?

[rshaffer61]

Lets see what you have in your startup

Please click on
Start and then to Run
Type in msconfig and press Enter
Now click on Startups
Then uncheck everything and restart.
If system boots correctly and is running smoothly and faster then we have a startup problem
Try going back into msconfig and check one item and reboot
Keep doing that till you have found the problem or all are finally checked.



Lets see what you have in your startup services area

Please click on
Start and then to Run
Type in msconfig and press Enter
Now click on Services
Click on the Hide All Microsoft Services
Then uncheck everything and restart.
If system boots correctly and is running smoothly and faster then we have a startup problem
Try going back into msconfig and check one item and reboot
Keep doing that till you have found the problem or all are finally checked.
Post back with the results

[Salil Surendran]

I did that. It doesn't help. The laptop boots up faster. The intial 10 mins or so is fast then it slows down. Makes me believe that the cpu is heating up or something. I used to leave the laptop on for days. Would that have caused the laptop to heat up and burn some circuitry? Is there some temperature monitoring tool that I can use?

[rshaffer61]

Download Speedfan (The download link is in the first line of the second paragraph), and install it. Once it's installed, run the program and post here the information it shows. The information I want you to post is the stuff that is circled in the example picture I have attached.