CPU / Audio Crackling

[Greencow_555]

Hi all,

Once again, tech support has failed and I have to ask the real genius's for help.

I have had no problems with my computer for a long time. I use it mainly for audio editing.

Recently, my audio starting clicking and the CPU was maxxing out at the same time as the clicks. I had some urgent work to do so I simply reinstalled everything and it started working again... for a while.

But today, it started again.

Any audio noise crackles... or if I do get a stretch where it plays ok, it starts crackling the moment I do anything else, such as opening the web browser, or clicking a menu bar in any software, and the CPU meter goes off the scale.

I have not installed anything at the same time as it started to happen. But, one other symptom did occur at the same time, which is that my computer now takes a long time to boot up, it spends a few minutes in an entirely blank screen before finally going to my windows desktop.

I have all the latest drivers for my hardware. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I really don't want to reinstall

My system specs are:

Windows XP pro sp3
X86 Family 15 model 67 stepping 2 authentic AMD ~2598 <--(I'm sure it didn't say all this before?)
MAudio delta 44 soundcard
Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT
2048 MB RAM



Thanks in advance.

 

[Greencow_555]

Quick update:

Unistalled audio drivers and the cpu is still spiking when I do things like clicking the windows menu, open broswers, etc...

some kind of CPU issue?

CPU's are where my knowledge of computers ends.

 

[MindoverMaster]

That would be a Windows issue. Check in Task Manager, and see what specific file is spiking your CPU.

 

[Greencow_555]

Thanks for the reply.

I had a look at the task manager like you said, it doesn't seem to be anything specific. I hope I'm doing it right, I have organised the processes by CPU usage.

When I click the start menu, or use the windows browser, I get cpu spikes, and explorer shows as cpu usage of 15. When I use firefox, it shows as 13. When I run an audio file in cubase, it sat at about 19 cpu. These numbers are in line with spikes, and they drop when I leave these programs idle. So, it seems to be just whatever program I am using, rather than one specific process.

None of the other processes seem to do much, although csrss.exe and 'System' popped up to 02 for an instant, but they don't seem to be in time with the spikes.

hmmmmmmm.

 

[Greencow_555]

FIXED IT!

I swapped the cable on the SATA drive with a different cable and into a different port on the MOBO. I also change the power cable to the SATA drive.

The SATA drive was also my main windows drive.

Somewhere in this action, the problem has resolved.

Thanks peeps! : )