Random Audio/Video Lagging Issue

I'm not sure if this is even the right place for this. I'm not sure what *would* be the right place though. I've been having a strange error occurring randomly. At first I just noticed it with streaming, but I don't watch a lot of local movies/videos on my computer. I use a laptop and have limited storage space. However, awhile back I noticed that the issue would also affect videos played locally. I have just found out that it will also affect games. What has been happening is that video playback slows down to maybe 2-3 FPS. It does it consistently. If my browser is doing this all browser windows will do it. Once the symptoms start if I try to play a video locally that video will play slow, no matter what program I run it through. I don't yet have an exact fix on how bad the the problem is with games, certainly pre-rendered videos (like intro videos) which is what I have just seen play slow, and dialog seems to be slowed down. I didn't seem to notice appreciable lag in the actual rendering of the game itself, but the audio was bothering me, and I didn't think to investigate further.

This is a fresh windows install. I am running the latest drivers for both graphics cards. The laptop is an MSI GL62M https://us.msi.com/Laptop/GL62M-7th-Gen-GTX-1050/Overview so has both integrated as well as discrete graphics.

To fix it so far all I've had to do is restart my browser. In fact with the local video, I didn't even have to restart the video player, just the browser. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it can be frustrating. Anyone have any ideas?

What is your definition of "limited" storage space? Once space on the primary drive gets low, Windows can start displaying all types of odd behavior.

As this seems to be browser related, based simply on what you've noticed so far, it could be RAM related (if you also have limited RAM and multiple Windows open) or just that one browser (have you tried a different browser?).

I currently have over 3/4 of the free space my drive has available to it available. I just meant that because it's a laptop there are not as many expansion slots for dropping in hard drives for local video storage as there would be in a desktop. So I don't have a large plex server or anything where I've ripped my DVD collection or anything like that. I generally watch my media via streaming services. Opening a streaming service in a different browser doesn't make a difference. And it's not strictly browser related, because when it starts happening if I try to play a movie that I have downloaded locally, it will have the same issues. And what really prompted this post is when I tried launching a game not realizing my computer was in the midst of this issue and when the intro video started playing it was doing the same thing. Although in the case of the game it isn't having video issues, just sound. Whereas with playing/streaming video it's both audio and video. As for there being something RAM related. Right now the only windows I have open is this one, and only had two tabs open. I'm using about 1/3 of my RAM (I have 16GB total). It seems more like there is some sort of video buffer that isn't getting emptied properly. Something that is processing the audio/video locally and is supposed to be self-purging and isn't doing that correctly and is getting clogged. What ends up clogging it is the streaming, because that is what fills most of it (like when you manually purge a print queue) so restarting the browser fixes it.

Have you installed all of system drivers available from MSI for the laptop, or are you trusting Windows? Never trust Windows to install hardware drivers.

I mentioned the broswer because of the last sentence in the OP.

Is it only your browser, or does this affect all of the running OS? As in cannot open a folder, a file, start menu, etc?

I have installed all of the drivers from MSI. (not all of the bloatware stuff, but the actual drivers). It isn't just my browser. But it isn't a general computer lag issue. It is specific to trying to play media. I keep meaning to check if audio only media is included and forgetting, however after replying last night I did have an interesting "breakthrough" of sorts. As I mentioned I use a laptop. One of the big reasons for that at the moment is I messed up my back at work pretty badly, so I am pretty much bed bound, and a laptop is easier to manage in bed vs dealing with a monitor and such. I also use a pair of bluetooth headphones https://en-us.sennheiser.com/wireless-headphones-bluetooth-hd-4-40-bt Last night I had the issue happen again and I was going to take some video of it on my phone to show you all what is happening, a picture being worth a thousand words etc. However, when I switched my audio source from my headphones to my laptop speakers the sound cleared right up. In fact, with these headphones, since they are also designed to function as a hands free headset, when I switched to that source the sound worked fine too. It was just when using them as stereo headphones that the sound was acting up. I don't know if that's good news or bad news for me as far as being able to find a potential source for this problem.