I recently bought a mini-computer running Windows 8.1 to use for streaming. At first it seemed perfect, but I soon ran into problems. The computer is a Pipo X7 that I bought on AliExpress.

When I first tried it, streaming was smooth and quality was excellent. But we soon noticed that the streaming gradually became choppy after about 30 or 40 minutes. This problem seems to be getting progressively worse. Now it sometimes starts almost as soon as streaming begins.

After some initial slight choppiness, the video starts to briefly freeze about every second or so for just a frame or two. Then it continues smoothly until the next freeze. Gradually, over time, the freezes become progressively longer. Eventually the video turns into a series of stills, each one lasting for up to a minute or so. For most of this the audio seems fairly normal. Each time the video freezes it then jumps ahead far enough to stay in sync with the audio. As the stream continues to deteriorate, eventually the audio starts skipping as well, but this doesn’t happen until after nearly an hour or more. Often the audio skips backwards a second or two and repeats before carrying on, while the video remains frozen. Eventually the whole thing just comes to a halt.

I am new to Windows 8 so don’t know much about its inner workings. I have been running some tests to try to narrow this down. First I turned off all automatic updates. Then I tried different browsers but that didn’t help. I then installed a health monitor to check on the core temperatures (this is a quad-core processor) but if it is to be believed, the cores are all well under 20 degrees, even after a couple hours of streaming. I tried closing and reopening the browser and that does improve things, but not completely. Instead of freezing for long periods, the stream goes back to the initial choppy behaviour described above. To check my connection, I tried opening a second stream on my desktop. That worked perfectly at the same time the Pipo was struggling. There is plenty of bandwidth.

At this point I can only think this is some kind of memory issue. It almost seems like the memory is gradually becoming corrupted, and closing and immediately reopening the browser improves that at least somewhat. But I don’t really know. I am in over my head on this and would really appreciate some expert help. I’m not sure what to do next. I really don’t want to have to try to explain all this to the Chinese seller, or send the unit back to China. If there is any way to fix this here, or at least gain more insight into what is causing the problem, that would be a huge help. The Pipo has two gigs of RAM, by the way.

Any advice will be much appreciated.