T1B

I at first thought it was the McAfee Virus protection that I was using, but I don't think so now that I've switched back to my old virus protection software, which I had a year trial on.

When I'm running iTunes, MusicMatch or even WinAmp, I'm unable to surf the Internet or anything without the sound suddenly sssslllllooowwwwingg down and then being jitt-ttt-eerrrr-yyyy.

I think it might be time for the soundcard to be replaced. It's a 5.1 SB Live card so it's a bit old. Another clue. When I try to bring up the computer, the Windows theme slows down and it's jittery.

I haven't had this problem before. I have a 1.7 Celeron and 512 megs of ram, so I should be good.

What do you think?

At Large wrote:I have a 1.7 Celeron

There you go.

defragged lately?

I just did defrag. Still no luck.

Here's something. My C drive is FAT32, whereas my D drive is NTFS. Could that have something to do with it?

On a related note, I was thinking about converting the c drive to NTFS. Is it a safe procedure?

If you restore from a day previous to the day you deleted the stuff, it should come back, right? I'm not a computer guy but you seemed desperate. Any port in a storm, right?

Elvis Monster,

I have an XT box with the extra math coprocessor chip so I could do my Fortran programming. How do I restore from a previous day. Also I have all these cool games on 5 1/2" floppys, if I cut the corners off to fit in that round tray thingy can I get them on my new 'puter.

atomicdad wrote:Elvis Monster,

I have an XT box with the extra math coprocessor chip so I could do my Fortran programming. How do I restore from a previous day.

Way over my head. I think I'll defer to ElTaco on that one.

Also I have all these cool games on 5 1/2" floppys, if I cut the corners off to fit in that round tray thingy can I get them on my new 'puter.

I would say that If you restore from a day previous to the day you deleted the stuff, it should come back, right? I'm not a computer guy but you seemed desperate.

atomicdad wrote:Elvis Monster,

I have an XT box with the extra math coprocessor chip so I could do my Fortran programming. How do I restore from a previous day. Also I have all these cool games on 5 1/2" floppys, if I cut the corners off to fit in that round tray thingy can I get them on my new 'puter.

If the treadmill hamsters running that computers power supply seem sluggish,
consider adding sugar to their water bottles. Also, change the wood chips.

try installing new sound drivers or reinstalling the old ones.

^^ What he said.

It might sound foolish but have to tried swapping speakers?

Another thing. How long has it been since you reloaded your computer? If it's been over a year then it's about that time. Burn your backups to cd in DATA format (cause your music will eat up space if you try to burn it all as music CD's instead of just mp3's).

Just a thought.

Actually I was having the same problem and I switched from IE to Firefox and it stopped happening. What browser do you use?

My initial curiosity would be:
When do you have problems? Just one particular sound player or all of them? Is it when you download mp3 music from the web or with every format? Does it matter it only happen when you stream video/audio from the web or does it happen even if you play it directly from the hard drive.

There could be many a reasons you would have problems. It usually takes a music file/stream to have the source. Then you need something that uncompresses it/codec to actually interpret it and then your audio driver and hardware to actually play it.

Certainly, IE could be the problem, but I could only see it being the problem if you were dealing with streamed music from the web and you were playing it through an embedded player in IE. Anyway if you are getting problems with every sound format (mp3, wav, (movie sounds in mp4, wma), etc...) then my guess would be your driver. This might mean that you need to uninstall your sound driver in windows to get rid of all the DLLs and driver files, and then install from scratch. If its a certain type of music format that causes it, and it causes it in multiple sound players then my guess would be the Codec that interprets the music. If the music runs fine in one player but not in another, then its the player.

So in other words, you might want to
A: reinstall the sound drivers with the latest from the sound card manufacturer's website (or mother board/PC manufacturer's).

B: download the latest versions of Windows Media Player, Quicktime and RealPlayer and install it

C: Switch to Firefox/Mozilla

Alternatively just format Windows and reinstall.

Talked with my brother that's a network admin. I described the symptoms at length and he had me try a few things. He's pretty sure that the hard drive is slowing down.

It's a few years old 40 gig harddrive. I ran a disk speed test on it and yikes...

The linear speed was listed as 1.8 mb per second.

Conversely, my D drive is a year old. It's speed was listed at 55 megs per second.

Seriously, this is getting annoying. I can't even move the mouse around the iTunes screen without it slowing down.

My plan: Beg the wife for a newer and bigger hard drive. Then reformat and reinstall everything, except for the D drive of course. That just has music and movie files.

Thats crap. a 40 gig? That is a big enough HD. You have something slowing your system down.

#1 did you follow DiTs suggestion?

#2. Have you checked your task manager to see if you have something running that is sucking the life out of your system? You could easily have some renegade program that is eating up your processor space and slowing everything else down, or some thing thats is writing to disk is causing the slow down, as writing speed is slower than reading.

#3, Go into msconfig and try shutting down any programs you have in there that don't need to start up when you turn on the computer.

#4. Did you have a disk drive doctor, something that will analyze the drive for multiple problems? The DiT out front could have helped you with that.

I got a new soundcard. That seemed to solve the problem...