WinXP Video/Audio skips every 60 seconds

[DarkPrime]

I have been having some major headaches with my Sager Laptop (runs a 3.0 ghz p4, 1 gig ram, 128 meg radeon 9000). Everytime I play a movie file (be it divx, mpeg, or DVD), the video and audio will skip/stutter very badly nearly every 60 seconds for about 1-2 seconds. The remaining 58 seconds has perfect playback. I have done a reformat and nothing changed. I am using the latest radeon drivers and have tried some earlier ones too but no luck. Once in awhile I will get really lucky and a video will play fine for about 20 minutes then do the major skipping ever 60 seconds after that. I have also watched task manager and the process "SYSTEM" jumps from about 2% cpu usage to about 20% cpu usage during the 1-2 seconds of skipping/stuttering. I know it's not a heating issue because my cpu temps remain fairly low during the entire time. Any suggestions or ideas are greatly appreciated.

 

[OneClone]

If you are using XP, try turning off Desktop cleanup. Which scans your desktop every now and then, and scan for unused icons that may clutter your desktop. This CAN cause audio and video to skip.

Also, some P2P apps scan your HDD for new share-able files every 60 seconds. perhaps that is the problem.

hope this helps.

/CLONE

 

[DarkPrime]

I will look into desktop cleanup, but I am not running anything else in the background that I know of. As I said before, I have quit everything in task manager that is not a critical part of windows and the skipping still happens.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm really surprised that the problem *isn't* overheating; I have a friend with a Sager OEM laptop, with a Northwood P4 2.4Ghz and an ATI Mobility Radeon 7000 or 7500, and after playing a game on it for over an hour, it overheats and starts to crash and die. That time can be extended by blowing a tabletop fan into the heat-exchange port on the side, but it still overheats terribly. Perhaps the newer models are better, I don't know.

If this problem happens immediately after a "fresh" (cooled-down) cold-boot of the system, then I would have to agree that it's probably not heat-related. One other possibility - media playback often needs a timing source to sync to, and oftentimes that is the clock on the sound-card. I've had problems in the past with software-based onboard sound, causing inaccurate A/V playback because of that. The skip/stutter might be the media player app re-syncing with real-time to correct "errors" in the sound card clock timing source. I'm not totally sure of that though.

 

[kcbass]

My desktop's been know to do this also, but it's not through windows media player, it's through musicmatch