Acer 6920G; sound unusable/system slowdown

Whenever I use any audio application, even playing music on Xmplay, I get serious slowdown. Browsers will be slow to open and the sound will start to stutter. It doesn't show up as high usage in Task Manager but sometimes audiodg can be using as much as 20% of CPU even after I exist such programs.

I've already done a system restore so I don't know if reinstalling windows will work even(which would be a *serious* pain on this laptop, I don't have a proper backup solution at the moment and I'd have to redownload gigs of steam games).

This is a very recent problem. I've tried updating the drivers, rolling them back, just about everything. Nothing works. Tried looking for adware & spyware.

I gig live using this laptop. It's looking like it might be just time to get a new one.

 

I'm getting DPC lag spikes every 10 seconds. I used to use Vista Antilag for this but it doesn't work under Windows 7, and WLAN optimizer does nothing(won't active the disable background scans tweak).

What can I do?

 

When using Skype:

 

The popping and crackling on regular audio playback can be severe and it destroys the experience completely.

This is driving me insane. I can't afford to replace this laptop. I don't know what to do. I used this laptop for gigging so I'm ed. I don't understand how it can just suddenly up so hard but it doesn't seem like anyone wants to help me. I've spent ages googling for this problem and found nothing that's helped.

I don't understand how a cheap mp3 player can have no problem streaming audio when a supposedly capable laptop crackles performing the same task.

 

To eliminate a possible hardware issue, make a USB flash drive with Ubuntu, and boot from it... try playing some music or whatnot, you should be able to access your FAT/NTFS drives from Ubuntu. If no issue arises, just install Windoze from scratch.

Based upon what you mentioned it sounds like the hard drive might be dying. A test like what I suggested would confirm/deny that.

 

if the harddrive was dying surely scandisk would have found something?

 

not necessarily, try my test out and see what the results are.. if you still get skipping of music played from the hard drive under ubuntu and temps are normal, i'd point to the HDD

 

I haven't gotten around to that test. I thought I had it under control but apparently not. When I boot up, I notice one svchost.exe taking up 50% of the CPU after everything else is done loading. closing that before it drops down again seems to make latency drop back to normal levels. but it doesn't always work.