Hi all, hope i'm in the right forum! Today I bought an Asus Essentio http://www.asus.com.au/products.asp... to use as a Media PC and I'm having a few problems. When I got home I loaded all of my music into iTunes and started listening to a few tracks. I noticed straight away that every now and then the music would crackle and stutter. I put it down to a problem with iTunes so I uninstalled it and loaded all of my music and vids into Media Centre to see if it would make a difference. Same problem. I thought it might be a driver issue so I uninstalled and updated the drivers for the onboard sound card (Realtek) I'm using. That didn't make a difference so I uninstalled the Realtek drivers completely and used the stock Windows HD Audio drivers. No improvements after that either. I loaded up Windows Task Manager to see if anything unusual was going on with the CPU or Memory while the music was playing. It appears that the crackles and stuttersin the music/videos occur at the same time that large spikes of CPU usage show up in Task Manager. You can see the spikes here -http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y54/nikuma/pc_graf.jpg So i stopped the music and just left a minimal ammount of non-resource hungry programs running to see what would happen in Task Manager and the spikes in CPU usage still occurred. Is this a problem with the CPU or some sort of application I'm using? I don't understand why the CPU is working so hard, so frequently without anything running.Remember that I only got this computer today so all I've really installed is Mozilla software and divx codecs. One other thing I've just noticed is that if i turn the onboard sound off completely in the BIOS and then try and watch a 1080p trailer from Apple without sound, the CPU power spikes cause the video to stutter. Any help would be much appreciated! Cheers, Nik

Your link to image doesn't work. Aside from that you may find looking in taskmanager at processes rather than just the CPU performance graph might give some clue to what process is causing the CPU spikes. Then ask in the Vista forum for advice on optimising Vista processes since this doesn't seem to be a hardware issue. Goin' Fishin' (Some day)