Windows 7: High CPU and Memory usage while running multimedia

Hi
I have this HP HDX18 laptop for almost 2.5 years now. It came with Vista 64 bit installed which was later upgraded to 7 Home premium. It worked fine until Jan 2012 when it started slowing down to nothing. I got it checked and cleaned by the tech support for HP(pccare247) and also updated the drivers for sound, display and BIOS. Now the system runs fine until any media played whether offline or online. After that it slows down to nothing and the sound becomes crackling and also with a delay and distortion.
The system slow down and the crackling sound does not come at the beginning and when it happens the CPU usage reaches 100% and stays above 90% until that multimedia is turned off. Also, the memory usage reaches 2.7 GB out of 8 GB and never comes below 2.16GB. What I noticed is as soon as I turn the WMPlayer off the CPU usage comes down all of a sudden to 15-20% and after sometime stays between 1-5% but the memory usage never comes down from 2.16, that is the minimum. Please help.

Welcome to the forums!


Is your laptop networked? I'm guessing it is.


Is the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service running? This consumes a lot of processing power. If you don't need it, turn it off.

Hello trader78 and welcome to Seven Forums.

Do you want to try an experiment? Download another media player (like VLC or WMP Classic) and see if the same thing happens with the new one.

Dear trader78,
Have you installed any audio/video codecs,before this problem started? Which version of WMP is installed? As suggested above download any other Media Player and kindly get back.

Regards,
sreedhav