What's causing my stupid sound playback to keep stuttering?

I have no idea what's wrong.....but whenever I play music, whether from iTunes or YouTube, it tends to stutter every couple of seconds. I noticed that whenever my music stutters, my CPU usage also jumps up to 40 - 60% at that instant. It's VERY annoying because you're listening to music halfway, and for like 5 seconds it plays very very slowly (like when your comp lags). Anyone else has ever encountered this and knows how to fix it?

I just installed Windows XP 3 days ago, so there shouldn't be much bloatware lagging my comp....gah.

 

there may be some sosrt of background process that is affecting things. i would try taking a look at your windows processes to see what process is causing the cpu spike.

 

Did u look at process list in task manager to see if anything strange is eating up the resources?

 

Yup. My CPU usage jumps up, but my processes don't use up any more CPU usage than usual. I can see my CPU Usage % jump to about 30% under 'Processes', but everything else still remains very low. The highest I saw was iTunes, iexplore & explorer taking up a grand total of 9 under the 'CPU' column.

 

Does it do the same thing over again directly after a restart, or does it take some time to start bogging?

 

Hmm...I'm hearing a weird sound too in my notebook. It's definately not my fans, and neither my CPU & GPU are under load. It's coming from the right side... Anyway, here's a picture of my CPU processes while it's spiking.




Edit: Yea, it does the same thing after reboot. It happened last night while I was doing some homework on Maya, and now it's happening while I'm just using IE + MSN, even after 3 reboots, one driver reinstall.

 

You said strange noise? HDD? Do you have an external HDD or a memory stick? Or play off a CD. If those play fine then HDD is the problem. If not, I don't know.

 

No idea what that sound is, but I sure as hell never heard it before. I'm quite sure because I tend to listen to my notebook to tell if the fans are running at 2000 or 4000 rpm, and if it were this loud I'd definately would have noticed it before.

Anyway, played it off my memory stick but the problem's stll there. I'm going to try booting up into OS X and see if the problem still persists. If it doesn't, I'm quite tempted to do a clean reinstall (again...) of Windows. That would make it my...5th install of Windows in 22 days.

 

Okay.....I don't know how the hell...but...it turns out that the noise was indeed my fans. *embarassed*

Anyway...I'm in OS X now, running iTunes and just about every single program that's in my dock. No stuttering at all, even at the point in time where I loaded them all up together, so it's definitely not a hardware problem. Gahhhh, so frustrating... =/

 

Well, seems like I solved the problem I think...

My fans were running at 4000rpm because I set it to run at that in smcFanControl before rebooting in Windows. For some reason that overwrite seems to have caused my stuttering. I completely shut down my computer (instead of restarting) to make it forget my smcFanControl settings, and well there's no more stuttering now.

The sad part is that...now I'm going to have to find a new way to control my fans in Windows. =/

 

Damn it....problem is back. It's not my smcFanControl as I thought it was. I have no idea what to do now...

*wondering if I should do another clean install of Windows... *

 

Check to see if your hard disk is in DMA or PIO, I had a similar issue once.