hello
i've had my acer aspire 5520 laptop for 1 and a half years and over the last few months it has started to judder and trip when playing media - at first it was just while playing dvds but now it's all videos and music - it's fine for a few minutes but then it starts tripping and the computer begins to whirr loudly, so i assume cpu usage escalates, but i opened task manager and had just the one application running and i stopped as many processes as i could. so it can't be too much stress on the cpu. the same thing happens with wmp, itunes, and vlc player. i've done a full virus scan with avast and no viruses were found.
any help greatly appreciated
cheers

hello jpph

you say whirring , would you describe that more like the fan getting faster or working more ?
could you download speedfan from here please Download SpeedFan - Access temperature sensor in your computer and run the computer at idle and take the readings ,and then run it up with your media playing and get it to "whir" and then take readings again ,
after about 6 mnths laptops can accumulate a build up of dust on the fan and the heatsink cooling fins, if this is the case then it may be that the laptop is getting hot

thanks for your help; i'm pretty sure the whirring sounds more like it was working more than getting faster.
i downloaded SpeedFan; while the computer was running at idle the cpu usage was between 2% and 12% and then played the video that i've been having particular problems with: after about 2mins of watching with no problem, the same thing happened and the cpu usage went up to 60% or 70%. when i paused the video, it went right down again.

actually the cpu usage went over 90% when i played the video again.

Definately,this video is taxing your laptop resources....

it's a pretty big video that i downloaded, it's 1,145,747KB. but no media plays properly any more, and the cd/dvd drive doesn't seem to work either. i just put in a cd and it wouldn't run; i attached an external cd drive and now wmp has recognised it and is ripping music from it fine.

i downloaded coretemp to verify SpeedFan's readings. It's idling at about 70 degrees. the temperature is jumping all over the place when under stress, so maybe the readings are incorrect?