When on a call the PC being used for MJ slows to a crawl

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mhoffman5
MagicJack Newbie
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:21 am

When on a call the PC being used for MJ slows to a crawl

Post by mhoffman5 »

I've been using MJ on this computer for more than a year and up to now it has worked pretty well. Over the course of the last month, with no changes to the PC, whenever I'm on a call the PC slows to a crawl, especially the internet. No other PCs on my home network are impacted at all. As soon as the call ends the affected PC is fine again. Also, not sure if this is related, every so ofter the MJ software goes to about 50% of CPU usage which drives the overall CPU to 100%. Again, nothing has been changed on the PC. I perform regular maintenance on the PC such as weekly defrags and reboots, virus scans, etc. Have the system requirements for MJ risen lately? Does anyone know how to resolve this problem besides putting it on it's own PC? Thanks for any insight you may have.
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sabresfan
Dan Should Pay Me
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Joined: Thu Feb 12, 2009 7:12 pm
Location: Buffalo NY

Post by sabresfan »

Give some specs to your machine. How many processes are running? Can you live without some of the processes that are running? Some of the last updates with MJ caused a bunch of problems for some users. Some had to upgrade their machines to get MJ to work properly again.
mhoffman5
MagicJack Newbie
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:21 am

Post by mhoffman5 »

Pentium 4
1 gig of memory
256G HD
When almost nothing is running other than MJ and the phone is on hook CPU is almost zero %. As soon as the phone is off hook CPU jumps to about 30% and then fluctuates between 30 & 50 percent. When anything else is running it quickly goes up to 70% and if loaded, flash games, then it tops out at 100%. Sometimes the CPU usage of MJ doesn't go back down after the call is completed and to correct it I need to restart MJ. I think I either need to get the wife a new computer and keep this as an MJ only machine or pick up a used PC for MJ.

Thanks for your help.
hsweiss
Dan Should Pay Me
Posts: 563
Joined: Fri Mar 28, 2008 10:04 pm
Location: Maryland

Post by hsweiss »

You just mentioned the "magic" word - FLASH. Flash is a CPU pig. If left to its own, it will suck up every cpu cycle it can. Running flash while in a call is bound to peg your machine at 100% cpu utilization. Personally, I'm running MJ on a 1.1G celeron with only 512M ram - its barely useful for WinXP. But MJ runs just fine.

Flash is a total non-starter on my machine. Youtube flash movies will peg the cpu and when that happens, nothing else will run. I run MJ with higher priority to ensure that it always will work regardless of what else is happening on the machine. Stop running flash and you'll see good performance.
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