Please Note This issue specifically relates to process scheduling in the OS, not the Windows "Task Scheduler" tool. (Even though the Windows process manager calls itself "Task Manager" which does a great job on confusing the issue...)BackgroundI recently upgraded my old PC from a single core Athlon 64 CPU and 1GB of RAM to an Asus M4A88T-M/USB4 motherboard, AMD Phenom II 1055T 6-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB Samsung disk.At the same time I upgraded from Windows XP SP2 on the old setup to Windows XP SP3, dual-booting with Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.Strangely, it is Windows XP that is giving me problems now.For the most part the new machine is much faster and more capable, especially at running multiple programs, as you would expect.However it is having a problem with one specific area of multitasking, basically suffering from "thread starvation", which is very strange to see on a 6-core machine, when on one (slower) core XP was running fine.Symptoms I noticed the issue first with playing music with MediaMonkey. When playing music in the background sometimes when I take an action in a foreground program (say the browser), the music playback will break up and start repeating short sections of sound.The really weird thing is, while this is happening, if you interact with the desktop- say typing in a text box or even just wiggling the mouse, music playback will start working normally again, for as long as you keep doing some user input.I have since found the same thing happens, although more rarely, with games (e.g. Unreal) and other apps like a browser. The application will grind to a halt and any sound will start to repeat, but if you wiggle the mouse or type on the keyboard you can make things start moving again.Note this doesn't happen when running the same hardware under Windows 7 Pro, and it didn't happen with the old hardware. So it looks as if this is either a new bug in XP SP3, or a general problem in XP that only shows up with multi-core processors.Interestingly have seen this issue before, back in the first versions of Solaris to introduce a realtime process priority class, which a naiive user could easily mis-use.The issues is called thread starvation, where the operating system's process scheduler is not looking at the process queue often enough, and giving a waiting process a chance to run. User I/O causes interrupts, which in turn cause the process scheduler to re-examine the job queue and "unstick" the machine.What I don't understand is why XP (a pretty mature OS) should handle the problem quite happily with one CPU core, but make a major hash of it with 6 times as much capacity available for parallel tasks!I have tried fiddling with the task priorities in Windows Task Manager, and succeeded only in making the problem worse.I have searched this site but not yet found anything that clearly relates to this problem. Surprising because it seems it would be a high-profile issues if it affected many machines.I'm hoping you have some insights into how to fix this.Regards: colin_e1 person needs an answerI do too

Hi colin_e, Method 1: You may start the computer in safe mode and test. To do this, follow the steps mentioned in the article below A description of the Safe Mode Boot options in Windows XPhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/315222Method 2: Put the computer in clean boot state and check to see if the issue persists; follow the steps mentioned in the article below How to configure Windows XP to start in a "clean boot" statehttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353 Note: Put the computer back to normal startup state, refer the section “Steps to configure Windows to use a normal startup state” in the linkMethod 3: Download and install latest drivers available on the Manufacturer’s website.http://support.asus.com/service/service.aspxThanks and RegardsAjay KMicrosoft Answers Support Engineer---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.