[Thrasher]

I bought a new computer a week ago and ever since the first day I had problems with the sound. When I for example listen to music, I now and then hear a very short silent gap, and when I work with the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive the sound is totally distorted, like for example when I copy from CD or burn onto it.
Anybody have an idea what could be wrong? I have never had these kinds of problems with my old computer.
My computer setup is: Celeron 2.66 GHz, 256 MB RAM, Win XP Home SP2, on-board sound Realtek AC'97 Audio. The HDD is master on primary IDE channel and the DVD-ROM/CD-RW is master on secondary IDE channel.

 

[bLue_oNioN]

Are your drives in DMA or PIO mode?

 

[Thrasher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bLue_oNioN Are your drives in DMA or PIO mode?

The HDD is in DMA mode, but the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive is in PIO mode. I tried to turn on DMA on that drive by selecting "DMA if available", but it still shows "Current transfer mode: PIO mode".
Do you have an idea why I cannot turn on DMA mode?

 

[The_Mac]

256MB is not a whole lot for winXP. I'd suggest either getting another 256, or disabling all the memory hogging aspects of winXP.

Right click on my computer, select properties, then advanced. Performance next, then under Visual effects, disable most options. I'd suggest leaving only Show shadows under mouse pointer. Ditch the rest. This will make your pc look like a win2k box, but it'll run quicker.

Next, run services.msc and disable any services you don't need. I won't go through essentials here, look for a guide online to suggest which you can safely ditch, and which are essential to keep.

 

[bLue_oNioN]

This is what I suspect is happening:

Your onboard sound setup throws quite a bit of work over to the CPU. Your DVD-ROM/CD-RW is running in PIO mode, which results in increased CPU utilization. During DVD/CD-RW access, your CPU winds up acting as a bottleneck because it's struggling to keep up with what it has to process, thus explaining the drop-outs in sound.

For starters, try booting into the BIOS and seeing if there's an option to disable/enable DMA for primary/secondary master/slave.

Is there no way you can move the DVD-ROM/CD-RW over to primary slave?

 

[JeffL]

Uninstall the IDE controller driver that the CD/DVD drive is on (either Primary or Secondary), reboot, let it reinstall the driver, reboot, and then check to see if the drive is in DMA mode again.

Windows automatically lowers the transfer rate based on drive performance, and its possible this has happened on your CD drive. The only way to reset this is to reinstall the IDE controller drivers.

 

[Thrasher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JeffL Uninstall the IDE controller driver that the CD/DVD drive is on (either Primary or Secondary), reboot, let it reinstall the driver, reboot, and then check to see if the drive is in DMA mode again. Windows automatically lowers the transfer rate based on drive performance, and its possible this has happened on your CD drive. The only way to reset this is to reinstall the IDE controller drivers.

Thanks. That helped, my DVD/CD drive is now in DMA mode and the problems during access of the drive are gone, but there are still the same drop-outs during normal music playback.....

 

[pedxing]

What is normal music playback? Are you playing back mp3's off the hard disk or CD/DVD-ROM drive? Are you playing back a normal audio CD from your CD/DVD-ROM drive?

 

[Thrasher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pedxing What is normal music playback? Are you playing back mp3's off the hard disk or CD/DVD-ROM drive? Are you playing back a normal audio CD from your CD/DVD-ROM drive?

I'm just playing mp3's off the hard disk and browsing the internet and I keep having these sound drop-outs. These things never happened with my old AMD Duron 600 MHz / 128 MB RAM computer......

 

[Duncan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thrasher I'm just playing mp3's off the hard disk and browsing the internet and I keep having these sound drop-outs. These things never happened with my old AMD Duron 600 MHz / 128 MB RAM computer......

What OS did you have before?

As mentiond above, WinXP can be a bit of a memory / CPU hog... next time you play some music, have the task manager on, and check what the CPU utilisation says...

...Should be for a pretty standard MP3 somewhere in the 10-20% area (max), especially if you're not running foobar / winamp with loads of fancy settings...

 

[Thrasher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duncan What OS did you have before? As mentiond above, WinXP can be a bit of a memory / CPU hog... next time you play some music, have the task manager on, and check what the CPU utilisation says... ...Should be for a pretty standard MP3 somewhere in the 10-20% area (max), especially if you're not running foobar / winamp with loads of fancy settings...

I had WinXP before too. I have the task manager on and the CPU usage shows something between 5-13% when just playing mp3, although when browsing the CPU usage when clicking on a link goes up to 60%.....

 

[wallijonn]

Are you using Analogue or Digital? Analogue is using the thin 4 wire cable and Digital is using the ribbon cable. Try switching it to the opposite of what you have now.

 

[Thrasher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn Are you using Analogue or Digital? Analogue is using the thin 4 wire cable and Digital is using the ribbon cable. Try switching it to the opposite of what you have now.

No, the problem is not during CD-DA playback, in fact I haven't even tried playing audio CD's. The problem is during playback of mp3 files from the hard drive. But today it seems that playback is fine, I really don't know what's happening to this computer.

 

[Thrasher]

The sound seems to be OK now. My suspision is that the drop-outs were caused by this AOL software, which was trying to connect to the internet through the dial-up modem and every time the modem was activated, there was a drop-out in sound. I have uninstalled that software.... I hope my problems are gone now....

 

[pedxing]

I had similar problems with some ISP software from AOL, Yahoo!, and SBC. They would just occupy my network connection and prevent everything else accessing the web.