When I am downloading something at quite a high speed my music, if I am playing any, stutters and distorts.
Is this normal or is there a way to fix it (without buying more RAM)?

Ive currently got 1 gig of ram and a 3gig processor and I generally use uTorrent to download and Winamp to play music.

It also stutters if I am using a lot of processing (like opening apps etc) but I figured that is normal, the internet thing annoys me though as I am always downloading and I am always listening to music

any help would be greatly appreciated


12

I`d be looking at freein up some resources dude, neither utorrent or winamp are particularly hungry in that respect so i`d fire up task manager while you were experiencing the stuttering and see whats hogging your resources.

Then remove or stop anything not needed.

maybe try a different bit torrent client , Azureus used to hog system resources like a goodun but more recent versions have been much better behaved .

its not azureus that hogs resources though, its Java, so perhaps java has improved recently...

utorrent is not resource hungry so i would stick with it if using windows.

have you tried a different music player to see if its something wrong with winamp?

its about bandwith, donwload programs use up almost all of it, resulting in an uber slow pc. basicly while u surf, close it, and when u got away open it up- leaving the pc on overnights to finish downloads is the best imo though

bandwidth has nothing to do with playing music from your hard disks.

If you are using your torrent client, you will be reading from, and writing to, your disk fairly frequently... Playing music and videos requires constant reading from the disk too, so pauses may sometimes occur when both apps are trying to read use the disk at the same time.

Your PC is *plenty* well-specced enough to download like a T1, and still be able to listen to music and watch movies at the same time - it sounds like the problem is that something is eating up much resources already, and like Church said, maybe some issue to do with disc-caching or the like.

Make sure that your hard-drives have DMA mode enabled:

DMA Mode - Micro$oft

Also, run HiJackThis so we can see how many/what apps that you have running on startup - there maybe some clues there:

Download HiJackThis

Run it, and then post the results of your scan on this thread, and I'll have a look over it for you.

A quick and dirty fix for now may be to get Task Manager up, (Cntrl+Alt+Del) + (Alt+T) and put the Run Priority of your music player to 'High'.

Try a different music playing app, like Media Player Classic, or something like that, it may have a different data caching profile or something, and may work better for you, although last I checked (not used WinAmp for donkey's years) WinAmp wasn't a particularly heavy-weight app.

You could also check in the uTorrent Settings, and see if it gives you any options to do with the size of your Disk Write Cache or something along those lines, so that you could try increasing it - I know that Azureus has a setting for doing that.

Cheers guys,
I did the DMA thing and it seemed to sort it out a bit. Occasional slowdowns but nowhere near as bad as it was before. However, in my Device Manager I have primary and secondary IDE devices (Im guessing that they are my C and E drives) but in the properties for each there is Device 0 and Device 1, for my primary device (C drive?) I am unable to change the Device 0 to DMA, Device 1 is fine though and they are both fine for my secondary device.

I will run Hijack this after work but Im pretty good with pc security and dont think I should have any nasties on here.

Im pretty sure it is to do with bandwidth and not a conflict between apps as the problem sorts itself out if I am just uploading (around 40kb/s) or if I limit my downloading to <50kb/s

thanks again

Hmm - glad it's a bit better, but as has already been mentioned by someone, unless you're *streaming* music or video of the 'net, it shouldn't matter how fast you're downloading anything else, if you're just playing the music/video off your hard drive - that has nothing to do with ('net) bandwidth at all.

So, looking at your Device Manager, it would seem that your Primary Hard Drive (Primary-Device 0) is not DMA, then? That sounds bad, if that's the case, as this would hugely slow down your system, quite possibly leading to the symptoms that you're describing. What mode does it say it's in? Is it greyed-out on 'PIO mode only' or something like that?

Also, check your BIOS , and make sure that DMA mode is enabled there for your Primary IDE device.

Check this page out, and try the fixes that're mentioned on it - it sounds like this may well be your problem:

DMA reverts to PIO

It sounds very much like a hardware interrupt issue, usually due to a badly written hardware driver. I've seen this kind of problem after the installation of unsigned drivers from crappy manufacturers, a rollback cures the problem. Have you had to install any 3rd party drivers lately (or ever)? I've seen this after the installation of cheap/old mouse, video capture, usb, graphics or network card drivers.
This might also explain why your hd controller is running in PIO.
Sometimes, assigning your sound card a dedicate IRQ gets round the problem (normally done in BIOS), or a BIOS firmware update may be all that's necessary, and ensuring you have all the latest drivers for all your hardware.

Cheers Scribble, that is a useful link.
That would explain a few other problems I have been having, mainly why it takes so long for games to load when I am well above the minimum spec.
Gonna check my Bios settings in a bit and then try that fix on that website. Will reinstall all my drivers after that if theres no joy, hopefully I wont have to though...

cheers again guys and fingers Xed

edit:
It works
I forced it in the Bios but it didnt change and then I tried the fix and its now Ultra DMA6

cheers