Stuttering in certain situations

[disrupteh]

Hey guys. Been a while since I've posted here.

Here's my prob: Ever since I upgraded from 98 to XP, my computer has had stuttering problems when playing music (mp3s in Winamp, this happens in both the Winamp 2.xx and 3 series), and also (the most frustrating) it freezes up in the exact same manner while playing computer games like counter-strike. The stutter is about a second long in which the CPU just freezes and then recovers. I know the problem isn't my soundcard or gfx card, since during the long running tenure of this problem I have upgraded both, and I currently have a SB Live 5.1 and a GeForce 3 Ti500. The rest of my setup includes a P3 800 and 384 MB RAM (motherboard is maxed out)

I've run msconfig several times, keep my startup programs to bare minimum. Any thoughts?

 

[Hipster Doofus]

How is your hard drive set up? Partitions? Have you tried a defrag?

 

[cruiser78]

under what cercumstances does it stutter? my music will stutter twice whenever I dial up my ISP... I think that my problem is just cause it's onboard sound and I'd think that yours shouldn't have that problem with SB Live.

 

[Clean_Rich]

Have you visited Windows update yet since your upgrade to XP to see if there are any driver updates for sound, video, or CPU?

 

[leedogg]

i would also recommend windows update. I seem to recall a patch or something for this...

 

[disrupteh]

I defrag pretty regularly -- I always notice the problem shortly after defragging. It will stutter when playing music lots of times, like when I open Internet Explorer. When playing Counter-Strike it seems to stutter randomly. I haven't hit up Windows Update in a while, I should probably do that. Thanks for the replies.

 

[LeeJend]

The SB live and ge 3 ti200 was what i ran for a while with winamp and almost never had any noise in the playback. I have one friend who had a probelm with music crackling when he did otyher tasks on his Dell computer. He eventually ditched the computer and the probelm went away with the one he built himself. SB Live with ge2 mx400 AMD XP 1700.

Possibilities:
The P3-800 is getting pretty old in terms of computing power, especially for multi-media. You may just be asking too much of it.

The 1 second sounds like a hard drive or cd player spinning up. Do the interrupts occur when you access a drive. If so is your drive capable of and set for DMA? It may be a slow drive or a drive going into low power mode. You can turn low power off in windows energy saver window. Right click on a blank area of the desk top- properties- screen saver- power. Set turn off hard disk to never.

If the system is playing back a file on the drive and you are doing many tasks you will run out of RAM. When this happens you go out to the pagefile and that may interrupt the flow of MP3 data to the sound card.

Are your screen saver or background changing when the interruption occurs. the background file is big and will cause a noticeable delay when changing.

Most of this would not apply while gaming. Unless oyu have a task running in background that grabs resources (file sharing, locally or over the net would be a big one).