iTunes struggles to play music when loading images on net.

[Silverbullet767]

Really strange phenomenon happening to this PC.

Recently I bought a 24" dell monitor, ever since I connected it, it struggles to play music from itunes while loading images from the internet. A stuttering effect.

To try and combat this I replaced the graphics card with something a bit more beefy. No change.

I overclocked the processor 20%, slightly better.

Downloaded all the latest drivers for everything, no change.

Computer specs are:

Inter core 2 duo 6300 (O/C 20%)
RAM: 2GB
Windows 7 Home 32bit
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series
Sound Card: Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS

Any ideas?

ETA: Oh and this never happened before the new monitor was plugged in.

Edited by Silverbullet767 on Saturday 20th March 13:50

[onlynik]

Memory issue, sounds like your machine is having issues reading and writing to the HD.

How many hard drives do you have in the machine?

[Silverbullet767]

I have 1 internal main drive for windows.

The itunes library is located on an external drive as is a separate external drive containing movies.

[marshalla]

Silverbullet767 said:

ETA: Oh and this never happened before the new monitor was plugged in.

Does it still do it with a different monitor ?

[Taita]

External USB drive?

[Silverbullet767]

It didn't do it with the different (much smaller) monitor, I guess that's because it didn't need as much memory to produce the smaller resolution.

Yes it is an USB external drive. 500GB Seagate.

Edited by Silverbullet767 on Saturday 20th March 18:18

[marshalla]

But does it do it NOW with another monitor ?

[scorp]

Silverbullet767 said:

It didn't do it with the different (much smaller) monitor, I guess that's because it didn't need as much memory to produce the smaller resolution.

Yes it is an USB external drive. 500GB Seagate.

Edited by Silverbullet767 on Saturday 20th March 18:18

The video picture comes from the memory on your video card.

USB does take some toll on CPU power, but for a machine of your spec it shouldn't be an issue.

Try grabbing sysinternals 'process explorer' (google for it), it's a replacement for task-manager which lets you see which tasks are eating resources, the program is free and very profressionally done (the guy who did it was hired by microsoft). Usually i find FireFox with Java pages open often hog my laptop resources.

[Silverbullet767]

Yes, it does it now with the new monitor, only on the internet, only when loading pictures or flash, and only when itunes is being used.

Thanks scorp, I'll give that a bash.

[Silverbullet767]

Well, I downloaded an run that program, lots of nice colours, what does it all mean!

[tinman0]

Have you tried to renice iTunes?

In XP it would be under the task manager. Find the process, and set its priority to High. Not sure how it works in Vista/7 though.

Essentially, it means that iTunes get first dibs on the processor regardless. Had the same issue when various apps on my old PC would fight over the processor. Ended up loading iTunes from an alias with options set so it would always be loaded as a High priority process.