HP A1230N Stuttering Problem

dman65

Distinguished
Mar 30, 2009
2
0
18,510
I am hoping I can find some help with a PC I have that is a few years old now. I have always used this for photo editing so the sound and multimedia performance has never been an issue. My son is now wanting to plan games against me so we purchased a couple of copies of Halo Combat Evolved to play networked against one another.

The issue I am having is that there is stuttering on this computer. not just when playing games. If I play a multimedia file there is stuttering. Sometimes it stutters on playing the opening WAV when windows loads. I have updated to the latest drivers available from HP and I have even updated the sound drivers from RealTek directly since the last HP updates were from 2005, but I still get the stuttering. I have opened the task manager and watched the processes list while playing back items both locally and over you tube and I can't see any program that is coming up and robbing CPU cycles and the System Idle task is always taking up more than 50% of the time even when the stuttering is occurring.

As I said this is an older machine. It has an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor. It has onboard Realtek AC97 sound. I use an nVidia GeForce 9400GT graphics card(PCI Express 512MB DDR2). The system has 3GB of RAM. Now, obviously I wouldn't expect this to play the latest and greatest games at full resolution without stuttering, but I would think I should be able to playback WMV, MP3, and YouTube without stuttering and surely I should be able to play Halo on it without any issue.

Does anyone have any ideas where I might go from here? I am really thinking this is somehow an issue with audio. The video benchmarks I have run seem to show that it should do fine, but I can't find an audio benchmark. I have also just noticed that it stutters when playing an audio CD.
 

dman65

Distinguished
Mar 30, 2009
2
0
18,510
Thanks for the suggestion. I purchased a new hard drive and installed windows on to it fresh and removed all of the unneeded software that comes on the system recovery disk. No change. It still stutters.