Hi all,

 

Since yesterday I have been finding that my PC has been behaving oddly. The system is under a year old and was the last one in the store that met my requirements when I purchased it. What I have been finding is that:

 

1) the mouse cursor on the screen seems to move slower than I am moving the mouse

2) if I move the mouse while I am watching a YouTube clip then the sound from the clip breaks up very badly and the clip plays slower.

 

Not sure why it has suddenly taken to doing the above. Any ideas?

 

Dave

Edited 16 March, 201511 yr by DaveHarries

Sound break-up suggests the cpu doesnt have enough power to keep the sound stream going while something else is being done - I have this when running BitTorrents on my old underpowered system.

 

If this is happening on a fairly new system, it would suggest a background task is sapping all your cpu's attention. Malware, Viri, or possibly Bitcoin miners downloaded by some naughty freeware.

 

I suggest downloading and scanning with Malwarebytes, and Spybot S&D as a start, run them in "Safe Mode" if you can access it (malware often stops you from entering safe mode).

Thanks for the tip, GG. The other interesting thing with this that I forgot to put in my original post is that it doesn't happen all the time when I am using the PC.

 

Dave

When it's going slow is the HDD light on the PC banging away?

 

GGs is a good first step sounds like something else is stealing processing power.

Definitely sounds like something is stealing processing power - my work machine is similar especially until it has been on for about 10 minutes. After the first 10 minutes things actually run fairly smoothly but before that it can take 2 minutes to open IE or a word document. I know the machine is not infected but just old and decrepit (a dell Optiplex 755 running win XP).

 

As GG has said try booting it into safe mode and running malwarebytes and spybot S&D (that will look for malicious problems). Also have a look at task manager to see what is running when the machine slows up - something will have a very high % of cpu usage. It may be possible that a legitimately installed process is not working correctly.

 

Have a look as well about what memory usage is running at while in task manager - if you are short of memory, the computer will use a pagefile which will slow the speed down dramatically as everything is written to and read from the hard disk. Occasionally simply increasing the physical memory will give the machine a new lease of life.

Edited 16 March, 201511 yr by kilted

Anti virus scan? I used to have Norton but found that when it decided to run a scan it did tend to hog resources.

Another possibility, is your pc downloading updates? See when your last update was carried out, I had something like 3 dozen updates downloaded & installed at the back end of last week & while that was going on my mouse was erratic. The first I knew about the updates was when told I would have to restart the computer for the updates to be completed.

What spec is the pc?

PC was purchased in Summer 2014. It is on Windows 8.1 and is an HP model. I got it because I had been looking at dual-screening but was put off by the cost. However the PC I got (which only cost me about £400) already had the dual-screen capability attached. Everything has worked perfectly up until this.

 

On another note, the problem only seems to occur when doing YouTube. However I just watched a music clip on there and was moving the mouse around but the problem didn't occur. It seems not to happen every time.

 

Dave

Have you made sure your Java and Flash are up to date?

PC was purchased in Summer 2014. It is on Windows 8.1 and is an HP model. I got it because I had been looking at dual-screening but was put off by the cost. However the PC I got (which only cost me about £400) already had the dual-screen capability attached. Everything has worked perfectly up until this.

On another note, the problem only seems to occur when doing YouTube. However I just watched a music clip on there and was moving the mouse around but the problem didn't occur. It seems not to happen every time.

Dave

What processor and how much ram?

Some really good ideas mentioned already - thorough virus and malware scan first, and then an update or ideally fresh install of flash player (YouTube still generally uses flash). If still no joy install another web browser like chrome or Firefox and see if you still get problems when using YouTube through that. It could even be a driver issue - I had problems with my web browser locking up randomly that vanished when I installed a new driver for my graphics card... Weird thing was I could run graphics intensive games no problem, it was just the browser that had problems so a graphics driver update was not at all what I expected to fix it.

Some really good ideas mentioned already - thorough virus and malware scan first, and then an update or ideally fresh install of flash player (YouTube still generally uses flash). If still no joy install another web browser like chrome or Firefox and see if you still get problems when using YouTube through that. It could even be a driver issue - I had problems with my web browser locking up randomly that vanished when I installed a new driver for my graphics card... Weird thing was I could run graphics intensive games no problem, it was just the browser that had problems so a graphics driver update was not at all what I expected to fix it.

Just a thought about youtube - you could try to force it to use HTML5 in case it is flash player that is the issue - linky

Download Process explorer from Microsoft. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027

 

Set it to run at login or from the startup folder. Click option "Hide when minimised" and minimise it. Then open the notification area icons and ensure that the procexp one is visible at all times.

 

My guess would be it's a HP, Microsoft or AV suite process doing checks for updates or atcual updates.

 

HTH

 

J.

Sound break-up suggests the cpu doesnt have enough power to keep the sound stream going while something else is being done - I have this when running BitTorrents on my old underpowered system.

 

If this is happening on a fairly new system, it would suggest a background task is sapping all your cpu's attention. Malware, Viri, or possibly Bitcoin miners downloaded by some naughty freeware.

 

I suggest downloading and scanning with Malwarebytes, and Spybot S&D as a start, run them in "Safe Mode" if you can access it (malware often stops you from entering safe mode).

I'd add Rogue Killer to that list,and run it often( www.adlice.com)