Sudden Drop in Performance, Massive Spikes in CPU Usage (Lenovo G51)

I have a Lenovo G51 which is hooked up to my home entertainment gear and used primarily to capture video either through a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle using Blackmagic Media Express, or through a Hauppauge USB Live 2.0 using AmarecTV.

Recently I've started dropping massive numbers of frames every minute or two, including locking up the entire BME program. AmarecTV is nice enough to note usage in the status bar, and the CPU usage hovers around 25% for the most part - it used to do this for an entire three-hour VHS tape capture. However now, it's doing that for a couple of minutes followed by about 30 seconds of percentages well over 100, going as high as 180. And this is for SD tape capture: I used to be able to capture a couple of hours of HD video with no issues. Hard drive usage is in the single digits, so that's not the issue.

Are you on v1803? Try temporarily disabling Windows Defender Real Time Protection.

v1803 of what?

koberulz said:

v1803 of what?

Windows 10.

Type "winver" at a command prompt to find out what version you have as of now.

v1803, yes. Turning off Defender doesn't help.

It's worth noting that I can preview just fine. It's only once I start capturing that I have problems.

The SD captures are Lagarith AVI and the HD captures are MJPEG AVI.

Additional symptom: went to watch an SD video file today and noticed that it was tiny - my display is set to 4K when it was previously....not sure what, but lower (it's connected to my TV via HDMI). Setting it to any lower resolution results in letterboxing or pillarboxing. 1920x1080 displays with black bars left and right, approximately similar to when watching 1.66:1 content.

Anyone?

Check RAM

Check RAM how, for what?