Audio streaming distortion

[johnb]

The Task Manager should be perfectly adequate to identify any process that is hogging philamenon's PC.

No point in making things more complicated than they need be, especially as (from a cursory glance) Mark Russinovich is addressing slow logons.

[Dave2002]

MR's pages deal with a variety of problems, and some of the techniques he uses are undoubtedly pretty clever. You need to look at them more closely. I think that if the problem is not quite as simple as you believe that some of MR's methods might just crack it, though I'm not holding my breath.

[Resurrection Man]

Not clear from your OP whether this happens when you are using the mouse or keyboards (which means the problem is local to your own PC) or browsing (while listening to something on iPlayer) which would point to possibly contention on your internet connection. Turning to the latter first, has this started happening since the school holidays began? Or in the evening in particular? Other people vying for the available bandwidth at your exchange and playing online games could then be the culprit....in which case there is little that you can do apart from signing up to a more expensive business type connection which minimises this 'contention'.

Turning to the first option, there are many excellent suggestions given by others and I can't add any others apart from asking if you have enough free space on your C drive?

As an aside, these suggestions do bring back to me horrors inherent in the grimy little world of running a PC. Recently I too have been suffering as I have an elderly laptop in my workshop connected via WiFi back to the main network. The wifi connection isn't the problem. What is the problem is that every web access seems to go through the damn anti-virus stuff which slows everything down to a crawl. Even swapping between programs, it runs like a geriatric dog. Windoze keeps telling me I'm running out of VM (although I regularly defrag the disk, and have much spare space and also have oodles of RAM). Firefox crashes regularly whenever I try to use it. So does Safari. And now Chrome (which has been re-installed but still keeps crashing). So I am reluctantly thinking that a clean install of XP is needed as any System Restore fails to work ....all in all, a thoroughly demoralising experience of technology at its worst. But by the time I have added all the Service packs, downloaded all the anti-virus stuff etc then that is a day of my life wasted and so I am thinking that it will be the parting of the ways very shortly and I wil take a sledge-hammer to it and that will be the end of my involvement with the PC and all its gory arcane inner workings.

Meanwhile my iMac of the same vintage continues to perform flawlessly. I had forgotten just how bad running a PC can be.

[Resurrection Man]

... Better not to go there in the first place.

Buy a Mac instead... Sorry, Dave, couldn't resist the opportunity.

[Dave2002]

Buy a Mac instead... Sorry, Dave, couldn't resist the opportunity.

Quite! If you try really hard it is possible to get problems with Macs. As with PCs, running out of disc space doesn't help them, and my 20% rule re spare space is a reasonable one to follow. Ideally (and I've thought of this with hindsight) it helps to store any video, photos, music files on at least one separate drive (not just partition) right from the start before the main drive fills up. This applies to both Macs and PCs and perhaps Linux/Unix as well. It's too easy to start off with just a few downloads in iTunes and then a year or two later find you need a 300 Gbyte or more drive to store them all. Further, tools such as iTunes sem to do a "wonderful" job of scrambling up the file storage system - particularly on a PC, which makes recovery/reorganisation slower and harder.

My iMac is still much less time consuming than any PC I've owned or had serious dealings with. Recommended ,and for those who might want to store music or videos it seems to me that a Mac Mini on a local network is a good and affordable option, even if there are PCs used for other purposes. Wait for the next model though, which should at least have USB 3 ports I'd guess, or alternatively push the price of the current model down.

[johnb]

Even swapping between programs, it runs like a geriatric dog. Windoze keeps telling me I'm running out of VM (although I regularly defrag the disk, and have much spare space and also have oodles of RAM).

As you no doubt already know the message means that, in order to run all the programmes you have open, Windows has run out of physical RAM and is also running out of VM (i.e. pagefile.sys is reaching its capacity) . Once Windows starts using VM the whole PC will almost grind to a standstill. The answer is to install additional RAM. (You say you have oodles of RAM but how much exactly?)

The VM available depends on the size of pagefile.sys, not on the available space on the hard drive. The usual recommended size is 1.5 x RAM. The pagefile.sys size in XP can be changed: Control Panel: System, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advanced, Virtual Memory. But the real answer is to deal with the cause of the problem - not enough RAM and too many programmes.

Or it just might be some rogue application hogging the memory. Check for this in the Task Manager.
- Right click on the task bar
- Select Start Task Manager
- Click on Processes Tab
- Click on the Memory heading to sort in Decreasing/Increasing order.

Additionally it is probably worth running virus and malware scans.

Firefox crashes regularly whenever I try to use it. So does Safari. And now Chrome (which has been re-installed but still keeps crashing). So I am reluctantly thinking that a clean install of XP is needed as any System Restore fails to work ....all in all.....

Some anti virus software packages have anti-tamper that protects the PC but which also prevent the System Restore from working. The anti-tamper can be turned off in the AV settings while you do system restore. (I have seen reports that doing a system restore like this can upset Norton AV needing it to be reinstalled, but I have never had that problem on the rare occasions I've done a Sysem Restore.)

But by the time I have added all the Service packs, downloaded all the anti-virus stuff etc then that is a day of my life wasted and so I am thinking that it will be the parting of the ways very shortly and I wil take a sledge-hammer to it and that will be the end of my involvement with the PC and all its gory arcane inner workings.

I too loath having to do a factory restore and then spending up to three solid days doing all the Windows and AV updates and reinstalling my software. But there are ways of greatly minimizing and simplifying the process (though it is late in the day for you):

1) Divide the hard drive into two partitions: one for all the operating system and software, and the second for all your data, including Outlook files. This is a fairly standard procedure in can be done using, say, Acronis Disk Director - shrinking the original partition and creating a new one in the space left - but make sure you take a backup beforehand.

Doing this is enormously beneficial. It means you can backup the OS/software and data separately and perhaps even using different methods. (The OS/software only needs to be backed up when you install software, etc.)

2) After a factory restore or with a new PC, after partitioning the hard drive and doing all Windows and AV updates (cycling round and round until they report no available updates) and installing all the basic software that I regularly use I then take a disc image (backup) of my system drive using, say, Acronis True Image. This means that I can use the Acronis True Image 'image' at any time to restore my system drive to the state when I did the backup, cutting out hours (or days) of installs and updates and without affecting my data (which is in the separate partition).

(I rarely have any problems with either my 7 year old laptop or my 1 year old W7 PCs - am I doing something wrong?)

[Bryn]

Some Firefox add-ons can be a right pain. I have not bothered to track down which of those I had installed was crashing my laptop every time I tried to login to my Tesco credit card account. As soon as I entered my user name, everything froze. For a while I resorted to using IE8 to access my account but today I tried Firefox's safe mode (which temporarily suspends add-ons, etc.). Problem solved.

[Dave2002]

While talking of Safe modes, does our OP and/or RM get the same problem when running in Safe mode+networking? Worth checking that maybe.

[pilamenon]

Or it just might be some rogue application hogging the memory.

I've just looked at processes, and the greatest usage comes from TeaTimer (46), mcshield (45.5), and three separate chrome.exe files (45 down to 16.5).

Reading around, there seem to be a lot of complaints at the slowing down caused by mcshield, but it is a core component of McAfee.

I've done various malware checks now and a system clean-up, but haven't tried backup and restore yet, or Dave's safe mode query, or installing more RAM, thanks for those suggestions.

[Resurrection Man]

Well, that has been an interesting exercise ! Many thanks John and Dave for giving me the nudge to take a deeper look. As background, I used to mess around with PCs at a very low level (assembler programming) and at one time got as far as sticking my pagefile.sys on its own drive to minimise contention with other program's disk access. But these days, I'd rather spend my time actually using the computer or listening to music hence my preference for the iMac.

OK, what did I find? It's got 1.5Gb of RAM, a Pentium R at 1.6GHz...not exactly state-of-the-art but good enough for my purposes as I run precisely two programs - iTunes and browser-du-jour. Those two and Avast - free version. I used to run ZoneAlarm as well but ditched that as I thought it might be interfering with my HomeSharing connection back to the music collection on my iMac. I was not too worried about not running a firewall as I sit behind a router with NAT. I could lock down the router if I wanted to be really secure (IT security was one of my portfolio of careers !). But there is nothing on the PC of note. I never use it to access my bank accounts. I don't use it for email. So a risk worth taking.

Especially as I now realise that, as suspected, Avast does scan web pages and downloads from the web. It does an awful lot of other stuff as well such as monitoring emails and IM but since I'm not using either, those processes can be stopped so gaining me a few extra CPU clock cycles. Of course, Windows then pipes up and says that I have no anti-virus protection etc and therein lies the rub with PCs as far as I am concerned. Because of all these multiple layers of firewalls, anti-this and anti-that...from different vendors, the chances of conflict are that much more likely and, as I said earlier, I prefer an easy life. I run Sophos on the Mac. The only things it has picked up are some dodgy PC attachments sent to me in spam. Otherwise it sits quietly in the background and so I have no complaints. The Mac just works. (incidentally Dave, the Mac OS is based on Unix).

I checked my VM and discovered that rather than let the system decide, I had set it to 768 Mb...a tad low..although in my defence I could have sworn that XP told me it was fixing the problem. Anyway, I've now delegated control to XP and it is up at a more respectable level.

That check of memory was very pertinent and an eye-opener. I'd looked at the CPU usage and like the OP, saw that System Idle was taking 95% a lot of the time. But I did get a lot of disk thrashing and never too sure why. However, I did discover two programs running in the background which although not using any CPU cycles were a bit memory hungry. They were left over from when I was messing about trying to get the IP address set up on the Jet network attachment for the HP Laserjet. Although I have a static address set-up for the Jet, a year or so ago I'd had to mess about trying to reset it and failing miserably as support for this on the Mac is non-existent. My filing system proved inadequate to the task of locating my 'How To' notes and so I'd ended up downloading and running HPJetAdmin which...and this will make you smile....is an enterprise-wide printer management system. Talk about sledgehammers! It also requires .Net to run and SQLServer

I'd got rid of (eventually) .Net but didn't realise that JetAdmin ran every time on startup. As does Sqlserver. Both sitting there...hogging memory. So I killed those two processes.

Question..where will I find the list of programs that are automatically run at Startup. So I can stop these two running next time I reboot?

So it is running very spritely now and I'm rather chuffed.

I did run a virus scan which came up clean.

There was no System restore inhibit as far as I could see in Avast and so my inability to carry one out is down to XP.

Not had time to check out the browsers.

But thanks once again.

[johnb]

Question..where will I find the list of programs that are automatically run at Startup. So I can stop these two running next time I reboot?

Two methods:

1) Run msconfig.exe from the Run command line. Look at the Startup and Services tabs and untick those you don't want to start when you boot the PC. The next time you boot you will be shown a 'warning' that some things are disabled but you can tick on an option (in that warning) to prevent it being displayed every time.

2) CCleaner (in its Tools/Startup) displays everything that loads at startup. It is very easy to enable/disable them from there.

Of course, it isn't a good idea to disable essential processes/applications

[Dave2002]

At risk of starting another can of worms, you might get some control over startup thingies if you download and run Soluto. Not everyone likes it, but I found it very revealing, and it can turn quite a lot of auto run stuff off. I'd say give it a go. Even if you eventually disable it, or uninstall it, you may be surprised at what it tells you - www.soluto.com

There are other tools - such as the one with a Scotty dog which goes woof!

Otherwise wipe the OS off and run Ubuntu instead-or set your PC up as a dual boot system.

Re Mac being based on Unix - yes, and you can even run lots of Unix or Unix like commands from a CLI using Terminal.

Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.

I have been known to run Saxon or xsltproc this way!

[Resurrection Man]

John, nothing relating to JetAdmin or SQL server under startup but quite a few in services. So I've stopped them and seems to be happy enough.

No, Dave! Too few hours in the day to start learning a new OS

[johnb]

I realise you are mentioning Soluto with the very best of intentions but I really do think that people should be very cautious about installing software unless they have confidence in what it does and how it performs.

It might be the best thing since slice bread but I wouldn't put it on my PC. I realise I am probably too cautious - but then I rarely seem to get problems on Windows.

[Dave2002]

I realise you are mentioning Soluto with the very best of intentions but I really do think that people should be very cautious about installing software unless they have confidence in what it does and how it performs.

It might be the best thing since slice bread but I wouldn't put it on my PC. I realise I am probably too cautious - but then I rarely seem to get problems on Windows.

It's impossible to be 100% sure about any software, or any tools. Come on, any computer is doing millions of instructions per second. In the end one just has to take things on trust and experience. I have used Soluto, and I think it's good, otherwise I wouldn't have suggested it. For the cautious they should set a restore point before installation, then rewind if not for them.

Incidentally, there is little point in making a lot of tweaks to improve one's system, and then using System Restore to revert back, as this will wipe out all the changes made. I noted someone in this thread was thinking about that. That approach may work if the tweaks are unsuccessful, but if they do work OK, then doing SR may revert back to a dud. However, once a good working system has been established it should then be set as a restore point.