T42p video stutter

[meeotch]

Sometime in the past few months, my t42p has developed a stutter in video playback. About once a second, any video I play will hiccup. Things I've tried:

1) thought it might be a codec issue, but it happens with all file types, including quicktime & DVD's as well.
2) thought it might be a cpu issue, but the cpu load while playing is low.
3) thought it might be the DMA settings - but those are set correctly.
4) thought it was the video driver - reinstalled, no luck.
5) thought it must be some concurrently running process, but I've shut down everything else that I could, and it still skips.
6) thought it could be the player, but I've tried several different ones.

Any ideas?

[madkat]

might sound stupid - but how "old" is your installation of Windows?

i've experienced these simptoms with two systems - a P4 desktop (solved by reinstalling Win) and a T43 (not solved yet - but i'm betting same solution)

[meeotch]

Yeah - the old "reinstall windows" fix would likely get it. I'm just really reluctant to do that. Install is probably less than a year old, but I've got a bunch of software installed, drivers, etc. I really should be better about making system images to fall back on.

The good news is - I fixed it. (Or I think I did.) Turns out that processExplorer was causing the hits. Don't know why, and I don't think I'd noticed it before... I feel like procEx has been taking more cpu cycles recently, which is pretty strange.

Anyway, workaround is to just kill procEx when I'm watching videos.