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FOr the last day now, Everytime I try to play a video or have more than one program open my CPU usage skyrockets through the fucking roof and the computer gets all choppy. It can't be a virus cause I scanned for that and only some adware shit came up that I got rid of. What could be causing this? Has anyone else experienced something like this where mundane tasks cause the CPU usage to skyrocket? Could it be spyware that I just havent detected yet?

I just recently upgraded from Win 2000 to XP Pro cause I figured "ah what the hell, might as well." Im starting to regret that decision. Hopefully something can be done though cause I just recently got everything reinstalled and set up again the way I want it.

Even just typying this my CPU occasionally jumping up and down in short spurts to really high usage. I hope my CPU isnt fucked...

EDIT: Hmm playing Winamp while haveing multiple windows open doesnt seem to do much. But playing video makes my cpu usage go wacky.

2000 Was the superior OS. Just save any important files and reinstall that. Oh, and if you don't feel the need to do that I'm gonna have to ask what CPU you have. If it's a reasonably modern one that probably shouldn't be happening (then again I don't have much XPknow-how so it might be par for the course), but if you have say an old PII or III or K-5 or some shit then that's probably normal...

Its an Athlon XP 2600+ 2.13GHz. I got it when I built my system back in early 2003. Its not a Barton.

Icehawk wrote:Its an Athlon XP 2600+ 2.13GHz. I got it when I built my system back in early 2003. Its not a Barton.

Hmmm. That processor is more than fast enough to run XP and play a video at the same time w/o hitting 100%. That narrows it down to the inherant inefficiantness and shittieness of xp, the i. i. & s. of your video player (or other app with this problem) or really big videos/ large ammounts of data. Are the videos your watching that do this really big/are the apps really processor intenisive stuff? What happens if you use another video player on the same video?

do you have any type of decent videocard? and how full is your hard drive?

Hmmm I think it may be something with Windows Media Player. When I play stuff in Media Player Classic they work ok. But standard media player gets laggy

Could be DirectX somehow got borked when upgrading, or the video drivers has imploded.

Run "dxdiag" to check the integrating of DirectX.

Also run a diskcheck to make sure your harddrive hasnt fragged some driver files. I had this happen, Windows kinda limped along, but not very well.

There is always obvious; check for virus & malware and hardware failures.

Virus and malware is cos Windows XP backwards compadibility with how it used todo things sucks.

The hardware is because you arent paying lots of money for fault-tolerance and redundancy and self-dignosing hardware.

Looks like your drivers might be out of whack, Icehawk. Try grabbing new ones and see if they work better. Also, check to see if DMA access is enabled on your HDs.

Darthdavid, cease the XP bashing.

I suppose you have 512 mb of RAM, at least.

Thanks for the help guys, especially Phongn. It was my DMA settings. For some reason windows "automatically downgraded the settings due to problems with transfers in the cabling" So I unplugged and replugged my drives back up and then set the settings back to their proper DMA and things are working fine now.