Slowdowns caused by kmixer.sys

Question

So for the past month or so I've been battling these terrible slowdown problems on my Inspiron 600m whenever I tried to play any games. Now your first thought is probably: He has something running in the background or needs to defrag or 600 other common solutions, but it's more complicated than that. My videocard died a few weeks ago and Dell replaced my motherboard/videocard. I can't quite tell whether the slowdowns preceded or followed this replacement because my videocard was so messed up that slowdowns were the least of my problems before it was replaced. Anyway, to try to make a long story short, I decided to do a complete reformat and reinstall, and even before I installed a single other program I installed some games to test and see if the slowdowns had been fixed, but they remain. After trying every imaginable solution including turning off every service I could think of and reinstalling all my drivers with those from the Dell site like 6 times, I downloaded a program that tells you everything running on your computer and how much CPU it's using. Anyway, this program showed me that my slowdowns were being caused by spikes in CPU usage by the System process, and more specifically the kmixer.sys sub-process underneath the System process. This has naturally made me assume it's some sort of audio driver problem (since kmixer is part of Windows Audio Drivers), but downloading the latest SigmaTel C-Major audio drivers has not fixed things (and I had trouble even getting the installers to work for a while, which I suppose is another matter entirely). If anyone has any idea what I'm talking about and can offer any solutions, I'd be very grateful.

TiltedFish · Answer

One last detail: Yes my Bios is up to date. I've run every conceivable update from the Inspiron 600m download page.

sagehen47 · Answer

I'm having a similar problem with the same computer, and I don't know what to do about it.  I've also updated all drivers/BIOS, and nothing's working.  I've bought two news games recently, and I easily exceed the system requirements, but they're totally unplayable because about 5 minutes into them the video gets really choppy.  Is there anything to fix this, or am I just stuck with a bogus computer that won't do anything even moderately graphics intensive?

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