Something Very Badly Wrong. Urgent

Guys,

Something very badly is wrong with my comp.

i was watching movies last night and it seemed fine. i came back on today and went to watch another movie but it kept freezing, and not responding at all.

i rebooted and tried again thinking just a onetime error, but it kept doing it.

i went through system settings and it showed nothing out of the ordinary. i dont have autoupdate and dont have any patches.

i ran ad-aware 6.0, found nothing, used reglceaner and got rid of all the junk and then scanned for viruses using nortons AV, and still nothing.

basically, it runs slower than it should and basically its crap.

my specs are:

1.2 Ghz Athlon AMD
512 Mb Mem
Win Xp Pro
40Gb HDD

below is a screen shot of the system monitor, and... well, look. the pagefile is using like 150% more than it usually does and the CPU process is always 100%. even from the word go.

i dont know whats causing. any ideas and solutions will be greatly appreciated.

any other information you guys need just ask.

please help, its a pain in the A$$

click processes and check what application uses the memory... shut it down manually, check if your machine runs normal again and then reboot... Hope it works

Any unusual processes running?

OK, i use a program called seti@home... is runs data units and analysis them. that was running overtime which is weird... cause usually it doesnt take that much power...maybe its got a large unit to analyse.

okay, the cpu power is still jumping around alot, from 6% to 10% idle. jumping jumping.

and the page file is still using heaps. usually it just sits there unused. anyways, i will look around a bit more and see if there are apps jumping unually.

thanks for the advice.

if possible, wondering if there are other problems/solutions

also

dodgy programm executable.. this will occasionaly not show up in the task manager some times not..
so disable your normal startup proggies and see what happens..that is if ya don't have some malware..

could even be a dodgy device driver...


Cheers

It seems that your computer's memory and CPU is being "drained". altought you didn't find anything with norton's AV, this looks like some sort of virus activity, a worm perhaps?

I would recommend that you run regedit and look over and over again for all the processes that are being loaded into memory, and try to find anything unusual to the system. run msconfig and do the same.

in the task manager, try to identify the applications that are pulling too much CPU resources, and disable them.

is your norton AV virus batabase updated? if not, update the AV and try another scan, or go to symantec's home page and run their online security scanner.

From the information that you gave, i can't think of much more to do.... i hope that this helps you...

did this movie you were trying to watch happen to be in AVI format?

not long ago i got some movies at a LAN in avi format, they wouldnt play because i got a stop error during the transfer, just as it was finishing, i tried to play the movie but it continually caused the system to crash, even if i didnt try to play it the system would crash or become unusable, BTW this is a rather new computer (4 months old)

as soon as i deleted the dodgy AVI files everything was back to normal

hmm, mr leachy, you might be onto something.... i read your reply and when i went to the properties of the file, it froze again... i deleted it.

however, when i went to properties of the avi file, i was playing music through the same program i was using in all instances.. windows media player... v9.

maybe its the media player. anyways, if it freezes again, after the reboot i will be back for another deduction of what it might be.

btw, i downloaded the movie file through kazaa, but not really. its hosted on a site but its used the dat signatures so thats why i used kazaa. it was the farscape series. (First Series episode 2)

anyways, i given up on that for a while. lets just see if its that file i deled or if its media player.

thanks again

Okay, im positive its the media player... it freezes during playback. im not sure without playback...:s

okay, but i restored the computer to an automatic checkpoint...which possible is where media player autoupdated and did what its done to it. so hopefully that stopped it. if not, we will have to find out whats wrong with the player itself.

will get back to you soon

Ok, this is turning into something horrid.

i rebooted after it froze again, and im not going to use media player...and hopefully i can know if thats the problem exactly.

if it is, i will be glad its not something evil and hard to get rid of :p

i will let you know if it freezes again, but if it does it wont be tonight, i will be having i nice hot bath...forgetting all my troubles.

hopefully, media player is the problem.

Trust Not,

If you used power DVD 3.0 to play your DVD I am having the same problem.

You need to do a cold boot to get rid of it.

Its like a pingy lag every few seconds?

no mark. nothing like that. its just normal avi's and mp3s.

okay everyone.

its definately media player. cause im not using it and im bored but at least the comp hasnt dropped out.

so, any suggestions on what it is and how to get rid of it? i could un-install and re-install if ya'll think that might work? anyways, i await your comments.

thanks again.

Something similar happened to, my system and my house mates.

Have you got the Nimo codec pack installed? I uninstalled this and it worked ok. It could be some kind of codec conflict, ie media player has automatically downloaded one and you have a different one insatlled already or something. (I am not entirely sure what the rules are on overiding codecs)

But the simtoms were very similar, system crashed whenever I tried to open a file with certain encoding and more anoyingly when media player tried to auto preview it.

I would say the best bet is to unistall media player and any codecs you have and then reinstall them in stages, boring I know.

Ahh, Forgive me I didn't read the post correctly first time round.

I get this alot when working with large mp3 or mpeg files.

Disable the windows preview (not sure of exact terminology but the part of the window which appears on the left when you browse to a folder showing the avi,mpeg etc.)

I have found that when you click on a file windows tries to buffer it to be played in a type of preview.

This used to regularly crash my machine.

Try groups.google.com with the same problem. Thats where I found the info on how to disable it.

Even when you click off of the window or close it I belive that windows is still trying to buffer the info.

The other option I can think of if it isn't that is to run defrag, scandisk and clear out your cache and temp folders. It may be a corrupt temp file which is populating your swap file when you reeboot.

TN123,

Firstly, how are you since some months without talking to you?

OK, i have had the same exact problem as you are having now but i can't remember how i fixed it, i just now i had it once and now everything's OK with the player.
You can try with this options and see what happen:


1 - Update your video card drivers if you haven't done it yet (by the way, what video card do you have?)

2 - Update Windows XP (watch out with recently "wrong" patches)

3 - Look for last codecs for video playing.

4 - Finally, if that doesn't solve the problem, turn down (or turn off) video acceleration. To do this in Windows Media Player 9 Series, go to the Options dialog box and look for this option on the Performance tab.


Do you have the same problems with MPGs, etc. or only with AVIs?

Good luck,

DKRR

it seems to be anything media plays in general. i am fairly certain that it was a codec error. i have had no problems with codecs before as i always choose the best ones... but as i was going through the options for series 9 i noticed it was set to autoupdate... so i think it would be best to unistall media player and codecs and re-install... im fairly sure that will fix it. i will get back to you when its done.

*******

DKRR,

Im fine thankyou, we should talk more often :D

how are you?

Hey TN123,

I've always been leary about auto-anything!

That's why, instead of allowing anything on my computer auto update, I go and do it myself. If I need a certain codex for a media file, I find out what I need (ie: AVI needs DivX) and get it from the source (ie: divx.com) instead of allowing the program to obtain it from wherever.

This way I know where the file is from and what the cause will be.

Kinda like a word to the wise.... :)

As for your predicament, try removing the codecs installed before the player. (if possible) I don't know how winXP functions, but maybe there's a way? Then, install known codecs from reliable sources.

Also, if MediaPlayer 9 keeps craping out on you, install an older version instead (like 7) or use another media player instead. (like Winamp for mp3)

I have been seeing som iffy trafic from media player 9 on my network...its all bashing uselessly agenst my fire wall, but media 9 keeps rotateing ports, and its all directed towards MS. We may be seeing the start of their DRM tech, if so that may be your problem...find a new mediaplayer would be my sugestion.

I ran into a similar issue with MP and normal MP3's, I upgraded to the newest version 9 and all has been well.

Just a suggestion,

I've been having some problems with Media Player, and this looks like the best forum to add it to so. Here it is. I've had problems with *.mp3's recently , windows says it is "connecting" where to i'm not sure, they are on my HD. I can however use a seperate player and they work fine. Did a check of the box, virii, trojan , regedt32, spyware, adware all the applicable checks.
See attachment, for picture of error. When I clicked the
more help button I got this page. Go figure, they don't even know what happened, according to the error it was Catastrophic anyway. Unusual to see an error in a program like that. Just thought it was funny. Anyhow perhaps this has something to do with, Apple's contract with the 5 major labels, to start selling media online at a dollar a song. Windows will have a version out later this year.?!

Ironically I recieved this error when I was watching an episode of the simpsons.avi and homer bent over and his crack was on the screen and the error popped up. Your guess is as good as mine.

Here's you solution. You have enough ram to disable virtual memory all together. Go to the properties of my computer, I think there is a performance tab, than an advanced tab. You'll see the virtual memory setting, and you can disable it, or you can adjust the minumum and max to like 200 mb, which should be more than enough, and it's better that way, cause your pagefile doesn't have to change it's size, giving better system performance. Hope this helps.


PuRe

Try to DeFrag the drive that you are using. It might just do the trick.

just helped a friend with almost the same issue.... download and install the latest dirx from microscrewup.....this fixed my friends up instantly (directX9)

i already have the latest direct x (9) and have had it for a long time.

okay okay,

last night, i went to bed thinkin about the problem, (cause it froze and i just turned it off and left) and when i got up today, everything is working fine.... and i have no clues what so ever.

so anyways, i re-installed it and it still froze (last night) and cause its working fine now, i just didnt worry about it. but now when i minimise it, it just becomes a minimised window, instead of the miniplayer of the toolbar. media player tool bar is ticked, and sometimes it changes to the miniplayer, but when the computer restarts it just goes back to normal, making me tick the media player toolbar again. and its annoying. anyone know how to make it change into miniplayer automatically like it did before?

lets say nothing picks up anything... what can you manually do?
also would it be possible to make a program that could tell you all the programs in your memory and every thing in que in the kernal, wouldn't this alert you to any new virus or trojans or keylogger or suspicious code if your virus scaners cant find anything?

sorry i think i just posted in the wrong thing... WHAT THA???

I know you don't want to hear this but a similar problem happened to a friend of mine and we did everything we could think of including reloading windows, drivers, updated directX, it would play music, I could open files off cds, but no dvds (it froze every time on any dvd after that) Turns out it was hardware. His dvd/cd-rom drive burnt out. I hadn't seen that before, but if you have a warranty it could be a pretty quick fix if that is what is wrong.