Every XP and 2000 machine at work today installed updates, and my turion 2.4ghz 2meg of ram laptop keeps ‘skipping’ on my mp3s. and I look at the task manager and a process called ‘system’ is going like the clappers. my cpu usage is averaging around 15% and it usually averages around 5%
The skipping is beginning to piss me off.
p.s. why does internet explorer use such a massive amount of memory? It’s allways top of the mem usage list.
I did two things: Forced the updates by using windows update, and rebooted.
It seems fine now.
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I don’t know about today, but the second Tuesday of every month is Patch Tuesday (which would have been last Tuesday) – that’s when MS releases new patches and fixes for XP. Maybe your work computers are a week behind?
The skipping sounds like an audio driver buffer problem. Either it isn’t large enough to cope with higher levels of extended CPU usage, or they aren’t robust enough. First try updating your audio drivers, if updates are available. Unfortunately the sound buffer is a hardware issue and can’t be fixed with a simple slider or patch.
Alternately, when playing MP3s, you can try and set your MP3 player’s thread priority higher. Go into your task manager (I assume you already know how to do that if you can see what process is eating up your CPU), right-click on the process name for your MP3 player (winamp.exe for example), choose the “set priority” sub-menu, and set a higher priority.
IE is always a hog. Use Firefox if you want a slimmer, more resource-friendly browsing solution.
In future I will try your thread priority tip. It’s not happening now (since the reboot) but as much as I do know about computers it never occured to me that altering the thread priority could be a solution to a problem.
However it’s a ‘botch’ (workaround) and I am the type of person who is averse to workarounds and prefers to solve the/a problem at it’s source.
I thought MS had quit supporting 2000.