What the hell is going on with my computer...

Ok, as of like, 9 PM tonight, my computer is completely unable to multitask.

For the past 5-6 years, the majority of time I've spent at the computer has been with Winamp running in the background. I used to be able to run any number of stuff in the background, including Second Life, with nary a skip from winamp.

Now, with this brand spanking new computer (p4 2.6 ghz, with hyperthreading even), I suddenly cannot do anything without winamp (or any other audio program) skipping.

the computer has worked fine until this point.

Iv'e ran a virus scan, gotten nothing. I haven't installed anything (except simcity 4).

The computer should definitely be able to run a simple program like Winamp in the background, no?

What the hell is going on?

LF

Have you run the usual cleanings? Like scan disk, deleting cookies, temp internet files, temp files, run defrag, etc.?

If you have and that still hasn't helped, how much space on your HD do you have? Did Sim City 4 put you closer to your storage capacity?

You could also have spyware and the sort, have you tried running Ad-Aware and/or Spybot? Most anti-viruses don't detect spyware.

Those are all the things I can think of that would cause your computer to slow down.

** deleted **

the hard drive is new. There are two programs installed... Simcity and Second Life.

There isn't any spyware or adware, AVG scans for those as well. There are no weird memory processes running.

The problem is bad enough that simcity won't load anymore, it just reboots my system.

LF

Having recently suffered a hard hard drive failure, I offer the following guess: if you have a marginal boot/swap drive many modern controllers will attempt to remap bad blocks up to the point where they run out of alternates. If this remapping happens in critical areas like the swap area or the windows registry, you may be seeing excessive seek/remap activity that is *completely hidden* from the software. This manifests itsself at the visible level as suddenly your hard drive becomes as high-latency as a floppy. System performance goes down the tubes and the OS never gets any indication.

I suggest that you try running hardware diagnostics from your drive manufacturer. If you do have a hard error and need to recover any contents, I discovered VirtualLab which was quite successful at salvaging critical stuff from a drive that had a hard failure.

Good luck.

** deleted **

LF, you mentioned "brand spanking new" computer. Does the new one have as much (or more) memory that the old one?

Try moving your sound card to another PCI slot. =)

And are you sure that WinAmp is accessing the DirectSound portion of DirectX rather than pumping out sound through software?

Does the same skipping occur if you turn hyperthreading off?

to give some replies...

1) Can't move the sound card, it's onboard (AC97)

2) It has 512 MB DDR 400 ram, the same amount as the previous computer

3) How do I turn hyperthreading off?

4) Winamp does it through Directsound AND through software.

I thuoght it might be something with IRQ settings, but my pci cards are empty.

LF

Erm I wish I knew! I do know it is possible.... maybe bios? Or "System Settings"? Maybe the performance tab?

Erm... I work for a non profit and a hyperthreading computer is a dream so far fetched here it would be laughed at, so I can't readily find out for you.



Hyperthreading is fake multi processors, there is still the same number of resources, it just gets to use some unused parts of the processor sometimes. I am not sure it would cause skipping in WinAmp, it really shouldn't, but I can imagine how it could in specific setups perhaps.

Have you tried upping the priority of winamp? It is an option in the winamp settings. You don't want it too high on a normal setup, but perhaps with hyperthreading a higher setting would work? Theoretically you could set it to 'real time' and it would just use an entire processor thread... I do not recommend that though.

New problem... maybe this'll help.

As a test, I loaded up winamp and started playing a song, then tried loading SL. Massive stutter, stutter, skip stutter, then it ground (literally) to a halt. Winamp just doesn't play anymore. I'll have to reboot, i guess.

Does this help any?

LF

try (re) installing the motherboard drivers... very often this kind of thing happens when the pci bridge isn't properly identified by windows... gettin the latest motherboard drivers for everything can often help this (via motherboards in particular have been known to do this but it happens with others as well)


additionally lordfly try removing any pci cards yer usin in general an try it (one of them may be sharing recources poorly with the built in sound chipset)

What version of winamp are you using?

I was using uh I think it was 2.0 and it literly broke on me, shuffle would just stop working for no good reason.

I updated to 5.0 and it works great. I know its doubtfull that its that, but hey, just an idea.

My laptop computer once caught a virus that caused this behavior after it was removed. It had remained resident too long on the system, and corrupted some really important system files. The wierd thing was, was that it booted fine, but performance sucked, and so did music playing, it would stutter for no reason at all (even when Windows Media Player was the only running process). The only fix I found was to wipe the disk and reinstall the OS.

==Chris

I've also had this happen on systems with 'bad' soundcard drivers, and bad motherboard drivers (pci bridge, specifically).

The SB Live! was notorious for this in it's earlier days, a driver update fixed it's problem.

An easy way to identify this problem is to start playing audio, open an internet explorer window, and open a webpage which is very "long" with both graphics and text. If the bridge drivers are the culprit, scrolling the webpage up and down very quickly will make the sound 'chirp' and 'skip'. It has something to do with resource tasking across the bridges.

Further analyses...

1) I disabled my onboard sound and put in an SB Live! It sorta worked, but my system was prone to violent rebooting while playing games (and playing multiple sound effects.

2) I took out my sb live!, and turned on the onboard sound again. The problem is back to worse. If constant hard drive access is maintained, the sound cuts out completely, requiring a reboot to get it to play sound again. Otheriwse, the computer just pretends the driver isn't there, like it's overloaded or something. Programs that were running audio at the time stop responding, and require me to go to the task manager and manually remove them. This usually results in a random reboot, though.

LF

could you potentially give me the make of the computer/motherboard lordfly... as well as the bios version currently on it, and the version of the audio/motherboard drivers as well would help


it sounds an awful lot like a problem with the motherboard, most specifically the northbridge chipset thats handling pci stuff... it may either be over-heating or have improper windows drivers installed

My chipset knowledge is terribly rusty . On my old motherboard, the chipset that I think did all that was a VIA. Now, I think it's a SiS. The SiS 648FX, specifically.

Going to their page, and typing in the chipset model, I get a bunch of driver options, for like audio, agp, ide, and so on.

Which ones should I get? My onboard sound is AC '97, or does that not matter?

LF

I've got the Gigabyte GA-8s648FX-L motherboard... computer is home built...

I'll get back to you on the driver numbers...

Gotta catch em all!

er I mean

You really should get the latest drivers for all aspects of the motherboard. Sound, AGP, ide and so on.

yes, its *USUALLY* a good idea to keep up to date with all drives for the motherboard.. of that lot the chipset driver (sometimes bundled with agp and/or sound) would most likely be what you need

in this case for audio there are both a whql certified audio driver, and a non certified one, which is newer.. i reccomend trying the newer one first, as they may have added a few more patches and bug fixes to it since the last time they paid microsoft a few grand

also i notice there is some mention of codec support in one of the bios releases for the board, you might want to see if your bios on it is up to date as well

flashing the bios is the scariest thing to do, ever. I'd rather avoid that if possible

I've downloaded a ton of drivers from gigabyte's website... I believe they're all current.

So on the SiS website, I should download all those things (agp, audio, ide, etc.)? It won't override the other onboard sound device?