Choppy Audio

2 months into my new laptops life, audio output went to absolute shit.

Any time I tried to play an mp3, audio stream, WAV (incluiding windows system sounds), AVI, MPG, or WMV, it chops. Only DVD playback doesnt have fucked up sound.

I pulled up task manager, and noticed that CPU performance goes from its baseline 4-10% up to 100%, every 4 seconds. I cant for the life of me figure out what the fuck is making it do that.

Ive run all the bullshit adaware and spybot you can imagine, to no avail.

WTF? Why didnt I just pay more and get a fucking apple?

 

if your cpu usage spikes, go to the processes list in the task manager and sort by cpu % usage. see what proc is making it spike like that.

 

Are you using Real Player? I had the same problem anytime Real Player started. Spiked to 100% and found the "Real Scheduler" was eating the memory. Even after I closed Real Player it continued to run. I just quit running it.

 

real sucks ass. can't stand that shit.

 

Hell, I cant figure out what it is.

System Idle Process is at the top, usually running 80-99% of the CPU.

System usually comes in second.

In terms of anything really jumping up there, not really. Winamp or Media Player tends to use 20-30% when its playin a file, choppy of course.

Gets choppier if I do ANYTHIN with a folder, or load a webpage, etc



I went through the entire list of processes and nothing looks unusual. I even googled all of them.

Finally, I reinstalled the driver from the gateway website, and it didnt do it properly. Didn't solve the problem either.


BTW, while its skipping, the HD light isnt going bonkers.


Not using real.

 

I don't ever use Real Player. Get the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack with the Real Alternative and never deal with Real Player again.

 

so this spiking is happening all the time, right? not just during audio playback? a quick thing to try is starting in safe mode just to verify it's not something like hardware going south. check to see if it's still spiking then.

if the spikes have stopped, it's just a matter of finding which piece of software is doing it. reboot normally and try quitting every program and utility you can, one by one (i'm talking about anything that might have an icon down on the bottom right for clean termination).

if you've still got spikes, you could then go into task manager and find any processes you know you can kill. you can generally google process names to see if they're vital or can be terminated.

also, you might try disconnecting any piece of hardware you don't need, tho i'm guessing a laptop probably doesn't have much.

 

yeah, i've used that in the past. i wish people would quit using rm formats for things, tho. it's a fine format, but the software is nearly viral (at least, it used to be). i suspect most people just go ahead and load it up. i used to like real, too -- they were ahead of the curve on the streaming video thing.

 

Without audio.

 

With audio.