WMA playback stuttering while multitasking

[imported_miahallen]

Using Windows Media Player 10, and playing back WMA's at 192Kb/s. My laptop is a Celeron 2GHz with 640MB of DDR266 ram, and it will multitask to high heaven with flawless WMA playback.

If I do even the simplest file transfer with my faster machine, I get distorted, jumpy playback. It has a Barton XP2500+ with a gig of Dual channel Corsair running at DDR333. This just doesn't make sense, anybody ever experienced anything like this?

 

[Bona Fide]

Intel seems to always be better in the media category, as well as semi-intensive multitasking.

 

[d2arcturus]

Mmmm... VBR MP3s. Maybe you have too many processes running in the background.

 

[n7]

You say that while you transfer files (on a network i assume), your online streaming .wma playback stutters?

Router issue maybe?

You need to be more clear.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: Bona Fide
Intel seems to always be better in the media category, as well as semi-intensive multitasking.

Not the issue.

I had a Barton with a gig of RAM, & i never had anything like that happen.

 

[dawks]

Originally posted by: miahallen
Using Windows Media Player 10, and playing back WMA's at 192Kb/s. My laptop is a Celeron 2GHz with 640MB of DDR266 ram, and it will multitask to high heaven with flawless WMA playback.

If I do even the simplest file transfer with my faster machine, I get distorted, jumpy playback. It has a Barton XP2500+ with a gig of Dual channel Corsair running at DDR333. This just doesn't make sense, anybody ever experienced anything like this?

It could be many things.. Video drivers, sound drivers, and chipset drivers all up to date? Any resource conflicts in device manager? Try switching some IRQ's around. The sound card might be sharing an IRQ with a harddrive controller, or your video card.. or something silly.

I had an issue where whenever I made a large selection (marching ants) in photoshop, and then tried to scroll through an image, my sound would skip, in any audio program.. WMP9/10, Winamp, and iTunes. Getting a new video card fixed that

An AMD processor will work just as good as an Intel in this case....

 

[n7]

Sup dawks


Oh wait, this is GH.

Hi anyway

 

[Tiamat]

are you using onboard features? or are you using dedicated pci expansion cards for features?

 

[imported_miahallen]

In both cases I'm playing the files off the HDD. In both cases I'm using onboard audio. Chipset/audio/video/etc.. drivers are up to date, and device manager lists no conflicts with the hardware.

The file transfer situation was just an example, almost any sort of multitasking (ie I use "My Pictures Slideshow for my screensaver, and if I select "use transition effects between pictures") the stuttering occurs.

On my laptop, I could be burning a DVD, encoding a full length DVD using the XviD codec, and surfing the web, and my WMA's playback is still flawless.

My problem machine is my HTPC, it has three HDDs, two 160GB SATA WD's in a RAID0, and an older 40GB ATA66 where the OS is installed. I originally had the music on the RAID, and already tried moving it to the 40gig, but I'm getting the same results either way?

Any more ideas?