Plextor CD-writer is taking up too much memory and/or CPU

[glovo]

I just built a computer with the following specs: Asus P4T motherboard, Intel P4 1.5 GHz processor, 2 sticks of 256MB RDRAM, Visiontek GeForce 3 64 MB AGP video card, IBM 40GB 7200 RPM IDE hard drive, Turtle Beach Montego sound card, Plextor 12x10x32x CD-writer, and a generic modem, netowrk card, and 1.44MB floppy drive. The OS is Windows 2000 Professional Edition. Whenever I try to write anything or even just use my CD-writer while using any other application, it skips music if I play music and it slows down my computer in general. Has anybody seen anything like this before? Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[rw120555]

I assume the music is MP3 or other audio files on your HD? WHat program is playing them?

If you are playing music from a CDROM you haven't mentioned, perhaps performance would be improved if the Plexwriter and CDROM were on separate IDE channels.

I don't think it is any particular shocker that, as you run more tasks, other tasks slow down, including playing music. You might experience similar behavior if, say, you were copying a couple GB of files in the background or running some other task that took a lot of processing power. I have a tape backup unit and, while I can do other tasks while it is running, I have to be quite patient. There is only so much your computer can do at once. And, while you might not notice if background copying was going slower, you will notice if there are breaks in music playing.

So, I don't think anything is wrong -- indeed, this sounds like pretty normal behavior to me -- but perhaps there are ways of tweaking things for better performance.

 

[rw120555]

Also, if you haven't already, enable DMA on the Plexwriter.