All Videos and Music suddenly playing at 1/8 speed

Hey, all:

Very cool site and service! My computer (XP) has just started acting very odd. Every video and music file now plays at maybe 1/8 what they normally runs at. Have two hard drives and moving things from drive to drive makes no difference. Using different players makes no difference. Downloading and installing a new player makes no difference. XP Help Screen is no help [hah]. Recently used CCleaner and Cleaup and deleted some old programs but don't know what I messed up. Any ideas to get rid of the super slow motion?

Bluestem

 

I think you'll probably find that everything is running slow, not just music & movies. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager & check out what your processor usage is sitting at, and what processes appear to be taking up your CPU time.

Also try starting in safe mode & see if your problem goes away.

Let us know what you find.

 

Hey, Wavetar:

Thanks for responding!

Well, I wish I could agree, but I have been dealing with the problem for a few days now, and have not noticed anything else performing slowly. Your suggestion about checking the Task Manager is good, but it shows I am using 6-12% of the processor, when I am trying to play a music file or not. Playing a music video takes 18-40% of the CPU. In either condition, playing or not, before or after, the System Idle process uses 74-95% of the space and time.

I opened my old WordPerfect program and a spreadsheet program just to see if things would slow to a crawl, but at most it brought CPU use to 74% for one very short moment and now sits at 17%. Large text files seem to be unaffected.

Also tried a PDF file of the entire works of Shakespeare (40 Meg) which ran the CPU up to maybe 75% for a couple of seconds, but now it is back to 8-12%.

And top of this I am currently downloading Windows updates, which I will value and use as much as I would 23 wedding toasters and eleven-teen corn-on-the-cob holders. Someone elsewhere told me this might be the problem, and since I don't know that much about it I am doing it.

I appreciate the suggestions but I think I must have disrupted something when I was monkeying with the register or cleaning programs, since it popped up about the same time. And it really does seem to be isolated to playing the video and audio file types. Even the Netscape 'received-email' announce .wav file is in slow-mo! Sounds like sumbuddy passin' gas--which is funny in the right situation--but not this one!

Still stumped!

Bluestem

 

Ok, but have you tried safe mode yet? If it works in safe mode, we can pretty well eliminate things like the O/S & the registry.

 

Hey, Wavetar:

Thanks for the feedback and reminder. I have not done the safe mode yet, since it took 10-12 hours to download the Windows updates (with the slow speed and the loss of service it takes a long time; fortunately the MS download will resume after a loss of service, and there were 53 separate items). Since it takes so much effort to get a stable useful connection, I usually let it run as long as it will. I live out in the country with phone lines installed by Alexander Graham Bell himself.

I will also have to see how to do safe mode. I have seen it briefly, but don't usually pay much attention.

I will check in with results as soon as I get through with it.

Bluestem

 

Safe mode won't rule out a damaged registry. Safe mode just loads a limited set of the registry, which may show that its an addon or spyware or some other crap. Likely you deleted some codecs, you might try downloading a codec package to see if that helps.