MP3's Skip Went Other Aps Load - Why???

[nasttcar]

I am running XP Pro SP2 on a Dell 400SC with 3.2 ghz and 1.0gb Ram.

I am playing MP3's as I write this using WinAmp and currently downloading a few files using Agent. When I update a webpage, the song playing begins to "stutter/skip" and then resumes.

This has only started lately and I know in the past I have being doing the same and playing a video game and not had any problems.

Also, webpages are slow to load. If I check mail, it just flies through checking all 5 mail accounts.

Should the paging size be set for some specific value or should I let the computer handle that. There are no hardware conflicts.

Also, I run XP off of a 40gb drive and that drive only has about 3gb of room left on it.

Help is appreciated.

 

[amdskip]

Also, I run XP off of a 40gb drive and that drive only has about 3gb of room left on it.

You need a hard drive upgrade and an 8mb cache drive at that.

 

[Smilin]

Bust open perfmon and take a look at your system.

Couple possibilities:
(somewhat likely) You are saturating your PCI bus. Mp3 data is crossing the bus from disk to memory/cpu. It's then going back out over the bus to sound card. Meanwhile Agent data is going from nic to memory/cpu then back out over the bus to disk. Meanwhile the same is happening for web data plus some extra as it caches web data to disk. This used to really suck back in the days before AGP since the (rather heavy) video data had to go across the PCI bus as well. Hell you could get 'static' sounds just from scrolling a webpage.

(Very likely) You are bottlenecking on your disk. If you're IDE it can only do one i/o request at a time and every activity your are doing is hitting the disk.

Your memory usage and pagefile are probably minimal to average.
Your overall cpu load is probably pretty low.
Your disk queue length may be rather high.

You can defrag, switch to a medium SCSI or fast SATA drive, bump up the winamp or redirector (csrss.exe) priority in taskmanager or maybe just multitask a bit less.

If you find in perfmon excessive memory, paging or cpu usage investigate to see if you have any misbehaving processes.