New laptop, performance not as expected

[VirtualLarry]

I picked up the $198 laptop from WM, the Emachines E627. It has an AMD Athlon 64 TF-20, 1.6Ghz single-core, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB HD, and an ATI system chipset (HD3200 graphics). It came with Win7 64-bit pre-installed.

Two things that I noticed. Listening to Pandora radio (online radio station), it skips while I'm web browsing at the same time. It doesn't really happen though if I click links and select "open in new tab". But if I click on a link directly, it skips.

I opened Task Manager, and looking at my CPU graph, it doesn't hit 100% ever (it can hit as high as 80% though at times).

Interestingly, I enabled "Show Kernel Times", and when scrolling the screen, it shows that I'm using 50% CPU time in kernel mode.

With a modern graphics chipset, I don't see how I'm using 50% of my CPU just to scroll the screen. Somethings got to be wrong there. I might install updated CCC and drivers and see what happens.

It has been noted though, that with the HD3200, especially with Firefox, that scolling is slow. I'm wondering if this is a manifestation of the same thing.

One other thing, it shipped with AHCI enabled in the BIOS. I'm not so sure about ATI's AHCI performance. I think that the disk access is actually the reason that teh music skips, not the CPU usage, when web browsing.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a possible solution.

Yes, I know that I should have gotten a dual-core laptop. But there's no reason that such a light CPU task (streaming radio) should skip, on a modern fast computer.

 

[Blain]

* Is the 160GB drive a 4200, 5400 or 7200rpm model?
* Are you running the latest drivers?
Most of their drivers are dated 9/14/09, but some are as new as 11/09/09.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I believe that the HD is a 5400 RPM model. The thing is, I can't see why the internet streaming radio would even hit the HD. Doesn't it just stream to RAM?

Edit: Hmm. For some reason, the online radio just stopped playing audio, with no indication of failure or shutdown. So I closed the tab and re-opened it, and now it's not really skipping. Strange.

And now I hear a "click" when I click links. I wasn't hearing that before, only the skipping of the radio. Maybe it was fighting for the sound driver before, and now it's sharing it properly???

 

[heymrdj]

Your killer is the single core. OS's past XP (and even XP SP2 and up) just really are crappy on items with single cores in them. OS's now take constant processing to do all their background processes. This ties up the processor to do that one instruction, when you have your important items waiting in line.

These days, I won't even consider systems with dual core or hyperthreading. And that includes notebooks.

 

[marcdisa]

My wife has a single core AMD Acer laptop that we bought several weeks ago for cheap. 3GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive and Windows 7. We have had no performance issues at all. Pandora streams fine, even have used it for multimedia without issue. It will even play WoW at 30FPS. I don't think the issue that you are having with your laptop has to do with it being a single core....

 

[corkyg]

With 64 bit, and single core, it can probably use more RAM. Also, it is an eMachine - pretty much at the bottom of the food chain. It's the old adage - you get what you pay for.

 

[marcdisa]

Did you uninstall all the bloatware that came preinstalled? How about using msconfig to stop unnecessary programs from loading at start up? I would strip that machine down to OS, Drivers, and essential applications. I'm pretty sure a lot of junk probably came preinstalled. I would also grab any available windows updates and run a disk defrag. Couldn't hurt. What internet browser are you using? Might even want to update your Java and Flash versions if you are still having problems with Pandora....

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I paused Pandora, and clicked on an ad for the show "Pawn Stars", and that took me to the history channel site, and I clicked on "full episodes", and watched an episode, and it was a bit choppy. It was watchable, and the audio didn't skip, but the video looked like it was lacking in FPS, and the audio wasn't synced to the video that well. I was watching it full-screen. (I guess I could go back and test if it played ok in a window.)
I'm guessing that this is due to full-screen flash being nearly all on the CPU, no? Perhaps this situation will improve once flash updates to 10.1 and allows hardware acceleration. ATI's newer drivers are going to support it, on HD3200 I think.

I wonder how Netflix streaming is. A relative of mine got that MSI A5000 laptop from OD last week, and they said that Netflix streaming works well on it. It has an NVidia 8200M G chipsets. Then again, it's also a dual-core T3000 Celeron.

Edit: On my friend's desktop, with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0Ghz), and a 6200, full-screen flash video (1680x1050) is also slightly skippy.

Edit: I visited the brother.com printer site, and clicked on something that opened a new IE8 window, and now when I click on links, the pandora internet radio skips again. It definately seems to be skipped, exactly when IE would make the "click" sound. So I think that this is some software problem with sharing the audio device.

 

[piasabird]

Screen savers and AVG software can cause problems with streaming at times. Also things like firewalls and anti spyware.