Spotify is making my computer lag

[MicoWazzle]

Plan

Free

Country

U.S.A

Device

hp laptop late 2015

Operating System

windows 10

My Question or Issue

My issue is that whenever I open spotify everything gets really laggy, the best way i can describe it is i loose frames and refreshrate by at least half. No only does my computer stutter visually but also audio stutters to the point where it sounds like it's glitching really bad. This wasn't happening a week ago and it suddenly just happened. P.S. I use an anti-virus software called Zone Alarm and in it you can set programs trust levels from kill(which means it can never run on your system as long as ZA is on there) to super trusted(it can do whatever it wants) and all spotify related entries are put to super trusted so firewall isn't a thing, so the problem with this is that usually when you have certain options in ZA block it will not make the program work right but I have all my settings put to trusted and here's the problem whenever I got to a playlist there is no songs in that playlist eventhough I know there is and when I try to play a song it won't play.

[Sebasty]

Hey @MicoWazzle 

Since you mentioned you can't see or play songs in your client, I recommend taking a look at this Spotify Answer.

Note: the article was initially for the web player, but I have seen lots of desktop users getting help from this hosts file method too.

About the stuttering and lagging - did this happen after something specific like an update?

I'd suggest ensuring you have installed all Windows updates. You can also try disabling hardware acceleration, which you can find by going to Spotify's menu (dots upper-left corner) - View - Hardware Acceleration.

Let me know how you get on 🙂

[MicoWazzle]

Yes windows is updated, and I didn't mention in my post but I default have hardware acceleration turn off even when I re-installed in an attempt to make it work. As for my hosts file although I can look at it and see no fastly or spotify in there my anti-virus Zone Alarm doesn't allow changes to any of the system files by user, I would have to completely uninstall it to even attemp to change things.

[Sebasty]

@MicoWazzle 

Alright, thanks for telling me 🙂

I would suggest trying:
1. if you can play anything in the web player - open.spotify.com;

2. if Spotify will work normally when you temporarily disable ZoneAlarm;

3. open Resource Monitor while you're running Spotify to see of there are any spikes in memory or CPU usage.

Let me know what you find 🙂

[MicoWazzle]

Ok, I've tried using the web player and it doesn't work. Turning off my anti-virus doesn't fix it... And it doesn't use a lot of cpu when it luanches but whenever i try to click on something it lags really bad. Maybe some bottle neck?

[Sebasty]

@MicoWazzle 

One way to figure out the cause would be going to Safe Mode.

If Spotify works normally under Safe Mode, there might be some software interfering with it when your PC runs in normal mode.

You can enter Safe Mode by searching for msconfig, going to the Boot tab and selecting "Safe Boot" with networking. Your computer will enter Safe Mode with the following restart.
To get out of that Safe Mode, you need to go back to msconfig and untick "Safe Boot".

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[jack341]

It looks like you're getting a high CPU usage. I had this issue myself a week ago, and you should try deleting all of your local files directories under settings>local files if you aren't transferring any music. This fixed it for me, though your mileage may vary!

[le_mon]

I had the exact same issue and only uninstalling zonealarm solved it for me