Video playback and games stuck every 5-10 minutes.

I have a alienware area 51 m15x and put windows 7 on it.
Now every 5 to 10 minutes while I'm watching a video or playing a game the picture gets stuck but the sound plays on. I've watched this behaviour with the windows performance tools and noticed the following:
When the picutre gets stuck (about 5 secs) vlc process takes up the complete first cpu core and the system process takes up the complete second cpu core. As soon as the cpu usage goes down it takes about 3 seconds and the picture is back and playing fine again. Now this realy sucks not only when watching a video it also happens when playing any game. For example crysis. First I thought the graphics card is overheating and testet it with furmark, but I could not find any connection beteween the garpic card temperature and the stucking image (happens also in furmark)
The only programms running at this time where antivir and deamon tools.
I will test to reproduce the error with these not running, but I have no clue what could cause such a huge lag and how to find it.

Any tip would be aprechiated.
Regards Ingrater

 

What gpu's do you have?
I also have black screen freezes during gaming, sometime the sound lags too, sometimes it goes on...
My problem is a dying gpu (typical for nvidia 8 series).

 

I have a 9800 GT and a Intel onboard chip. How can I find out if it is dying?
If I switch to the intel onboard chip the freezes still occur.

 

Well when you get black screen freezes, white flashes, rainbow sparks and purple triangle lines thats a sign your gpu is dying. if it also occurs with your discrete graphics..I honoustly don't know, sry.

 

No the gpu is deffinitly still good as I did test it with furmark for 10 minutes. No errors did occur. And it does not seem like it is something wrong with the grahpics cards it just seems that something in the system does eat up all cpu resources for about 5 seconds. I know that that the system process is eating up a whole core but is there a possibility to log what the system process is doing? Simply knowing that the it is the system process doesn't help at all...

 

The System Idle Process is a thread that infinitely loops on all Windows system. This is the process that actually lets Windows figure out how much the CPU is idle/being used. It is also responsible for issuing the HLT instruction to the CPU and in versions of Windows after 2000, other CPU power saving features(this is why while you're in the BIOS, the CPU idle temp will be higher than when in Windows).

Conversely, the System process measures the amount of CPU time the kernel threads are using. Usually this should be fairly low, 0-5% being about the norm. I can't imagine this thread reporting 50% because the operating system kernel is involved in very little of most of the tasks you use a computer for. Well I guess it's technically involved in everything since it handles a lot of the really low-level tasks (think thread-scheduling at the hardware level, hardware memory mapping and paging, interrupt handling, etc.), but it shouldn't be taking an entire core so I assume you meant the System Idle Process.

If you really do mean the System process, then I would suggest a reformat and reinstall of Windows since something definitely went wrong at the OS level.

If you meant the System Idle Process, I'm inclined to believe that there's a problem with the GPU switching software and/or video card drivers in use. Are all the drivers and GPU software updated for Windows 7?

On a sidenote, VLC is a terrible media player. I suggest using MPC-HC or just getting CCCP and never having to worry about being unable to play a video file (except Quicktime and RealMedia).

 

No I definitly mean the system process because I have a german windows and the system idle process is named "Leerlaufprozess" there.
And as said this not only happens during video playback it also happens during furmark and any other 3d application or game. Well I think I will go for a reinstall then as soon as I find some time.