Make sure your computer isn’t bogged down with other tasks while you’re using the Media Player.
One of the major reasons computers have problems and perform poorly is that they simply have too much to do. Themes and screen savers that use system resources, and programs and files that take up valuable hard drive space, can cause performance problems. When cleaning up your computer to enhance performance, make sure you’ve dealt with these things appropriately. Turn off themes and system-intensive screen savers that require computations or lots of video memory, uninstall programs you don’t need and no longer use, and rid your hard drive of unnecessary files.
Another reason media hangs up, freezes, or performs poorly is that the application, in this case Windows Media Player 10, needs all of the resources it can get its hands on. If the application needs RAM, and you’re using what available RAM you have to print a large document or perform a complicated edit in Photoshop, performance will certainly suffer. Use a little common sense; don’t try to render a movie while at the same time you’re burning a DVD, and make sure your applications are getting the attention they need from both RAM and the processor.
You can also enhance computer, and thus media, performance by making sure you don’t have unnecessary programs running in the background that you don’t know about or need. If you’ve downloaded a lot of programs, shareware, freeware, or third-party applications from the Internet, chances are you’re going to be more than a little surprised at what you find running behind the scenes.
You can use the System Configuration Utility to see what is running in the background. To open this utility:
1. Click Start | Run and, in the Run dialog box, type msconfig.exe.
2. Click the Startup tab and scroll down to the bottom of the list.
3. Uncheck items you no longer use.
4. Click OK and restart the computer.
If you’re ever unsure about what an item does, a quick search on Google for the entry will generally produce results. Searching for one entry on my computer, SisUSBrg, Google offered up information that this particular entry is a sound-card driver. It would make sense that this is a necessary component.
When removing items, choose the items one at a time, restart the computer, and verify that you don’t get any error messages. If the computer runs fine, return here and delete another.
Don’t uninstall anything you aren’t familiar with. Windows XP needs RUNDLL32, for instance. Only uninstall what you recognize and know you don’t need.