Hello! I've got trouble with my video. When playing divx videos and when playing 3D-games, the image and sound freez every 2 minutes or so. After 2 or 3 seconds, everything comes back to normal. Quite irritating. My system: Prescott 3.4GHz 1GB RAM video: Gigabyte 6600GT Mobo: Foxconn 915A01 The things I already tried to solved this (unsuccessfuly): - Using another divx player - Turning resolution to the minimum - Turning hardware acceleration to 0 - Updating NVidia drivers - Updating VGA BIOS. Here comes a part of a report from "Security Task Manager", tracking cpu-load of different processes (see GIF file attached). As you can see, the process called "system" sucks up 100% every now and then. At these exact times, Windows Media Player get 0 cpu, and freezes. Does someone know what "System" is good for? After what I read on the net, it is the same as System Idle Process. What's the difference? Why would a such process prevent other processes to use cpu? What should I do to make it work? Any help is welcome, thank you! Dontiego

Use built in tests. Use Taskmanager, Performance monitor to include making logs and Event viewer to give you clues to the trouble. Start with event viewer. You might have to run perfmon logs from another computer to help reduce the effect the actual log process has on the system. The actual test might be anything from video to hard drive. I would also look at things like hard drive cache. Disable it in windows if your drives have built in caches. Look also to bios. You might have to actually detune it back to normal or failsafe/default settings.

Thank you for your answer, jefro! I notice now that the image I wanted to include didn't make it. It is a screen dump from Security Task Manager. http://gfleutot.free.fr/tmp/video/video-pb-dontiego.GIF It seems quite clear that the problem is not video, but this "System" eating all cpu-time every two minutes. Any suggestion about why it would do that? I didn't see this problem when I had other disks, so I will try to deactivate HDD cache. But when I had other disks, I had also another windows install...

My problem is now solved (I think). The great tool "Process Explorer" from Sysinternals helped me to: - confirm that System was the process causing troubles - in this process, the thread eating up all cpu resource every two minutes was iaStor.sys (driver for RAID) So I went to intel's page and downloaded the latest drivers for my south bridge. Solved! Jefro you were right, it was a HDD problem :) Strange that neither my mobo's install CD nor winXP got the latest drivers. Thanks for your help!