Why can my hi spec laptop not play music and browse net?

Hi all, have a problem with my PC which I just cannot seem to resolve.

I have a compaq presario CQ60 running a 2.1ghz dual core processor with 4gb of DDR Ram on Windows 7.

For some reason I cannot play a music file on WMP and browse the internet (firefox, IE, Chrome) at the same time. When loading a page the music stutters and stammers.

I have tried reinstalling WMP and the web browser, I have run MSconfig and turned off all programs that are not needed, i have run defrag and cleaned up all temp files.

I am using bullguard anti virus which is fully updated.

I simply cannot understand why my system, which although not the greatest out there, is pretty high spec but cannot manage two fairly simple tasks.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

As far as the audio goes, have you tried uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers? Sometimes that can help. The internet can be a myriad of things from just not being connected to a virus that's affecting your connection. If this is a new problem, you can always try to do a system restore to a point before these issues started to occur.

-- Ryan
Windows Outreach Team

 

Thanks for the advice Ryan. I should have mentioned in my OP, yes I have reinstalled the audio drivers. I even completely deleted them and reinstalled fresh rather than just overwriting the exisiting drivers.

As far as how long the problem has been present, pretty much since I purchased the laptop, it never used to bother me as I rarely played music from the laptop.

 

Hmm, something is obviously throttling your machine which is good enough to handle all that work. Can you give us a screenshot snip of your 'Task Manager' Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Processes and click on 'Memory' to order what process is using the most memory. Same for CPU processes, make sure to tick the 'Show Processes from all users'. It'll give us some info.

(Thanks Ryan, man you guys are good!)rolleyes

 

Greetings, ncolli1981.

Agreed with augiedoggie. Couple of other suggestions in that vein:

1. You might try another media player, such as VLC, try to ascertain if this is a WMP problem or not.

2. DPC Latency Checker is often recommended here to check data stream capabilities - you might check it out, see if anything stands out.

 

Just tried VLC and the fault it still present.

Had a look at the latency checker, when playing music and browsing the web all of the bars go red intermitantly but above that I cannot make head nor tale of it.

 

The fact that VLC shows the same symptoms indicates that WMP is probably not the cause of the problem.

The red bars indicate that some device or driver is causing dropouts. The recommended procedure is to selectively disable drivers in Device Manager to try to identify the culprit, but before doing that, a couple of other suggestions:

1. Do try to post screenshots of your Task Manager CPU and Memory usages, as augiedoggie suggests - we may be able to spot something there.

2. Try booting the machine into Safe Mode with Networking, and see if the Latency Checker will run. If so, then that might give us some more clues.