Win Amp Woes

[ramjam]

I play .waves on my Thinkpad 390x (p3 500. 256 M RAM) using winamp 2.9 in a night club setting & get annoying skips now & then. Please Help!

[chuckster]

it's possible other programs are running in the background that are hogging system resources. there are at least two ways to 'free-up' more system resources that might prevent winamp hiccups. 1) you could try disabling obvious things that show up running in your system tray. this is generally accomplished by right clicking on the icon and selecting properties or preferences, and instructing it ot to start up each time windows starts. 2) you can also disable the 'not-so-obvious' programs that are running in the background by doing a start - run - msconfig then select the startup tab and carefully disable programs you don't need to run all the time.

[ramjam]

Thanks but been there,done that. Everything unchecked in startup & no other program is running. I also checked all the music for glitches, no luck. I guess I'm going to have to abandon my machine.

[Bruce Guttman]

Odd suggestions:

1. Make sure you don't have some hidden programs hogging resources. Do an AdAware and a Spybot scan on the drive.

2. Make sure the drive is defragmented. If the computer is constantly looking for fragments of files all over the disk, it can affect your performance.

I'm not familiar with the 390's, but maybe increasing RAM to 512 will help?

Hope this helps.

[ramjam]

This machine is not used for the internet, however the double the RAM idea is pretty much the only thing I haven't tried. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

[whizkid]

It might also be your hard drive. One hard drive of mine has taken to locking up my machine for a few seconds at a time.

But yours might just be a little slow, and fragmented.

Consider a drive upgrade. Get a big cache, large capacity and fast platters. You won't need that speed much of the time, but it can help.

If your drive is the original that came with the machine, it's over four years old and might be starting to fail.

[Garth Farley]

Check that the IRQs for the soundcard aren't being shared with other components.

I've a 380z (fine machine), I find that sound from all programs 'cracks' every few seconds - I traced it to my PCMCIA network card sharing some resources with it. When I ejected it (or disabled it in Device manager) the problem went away.

GF

[leoblob]

I play .waves on my Thinkpad 390x (p3 500. 256 M RAM) using winamp 2.9 in a night club setting & get annoying skips now & then. Please Help!

The other suggestions are good. Here's another one ... I had a similar problem with my (much slower) 365x. I eventually found that if I manually set the swap file size (both min and max), I could eliminate the problem. This is because the machine will pause if/when it creates a large swap file, and that can cause music to skip or pause.

I looked at the size of the swap file (using Windows Explorer), immediately after playing my sound & video file. I think it was around 60 megs. I manually set the swap file max to 50 and the mininum to 10. This helped. I eventually ended up with a min of 10 and a max of 25. No more skips.

Now since I've upped my RAM (from 40 to 72) I can play the file OK with the automatic swap file settings again.