>I'm going to take a rough shot at it being the graphics card. Unless you're
>running something less than a P150 you should never have skipping in
>Winamp.
>If you have a P150 or above then even the screensaver should cause much of
>a
>problem - you only need a P166 to use some screensaver plug-ins for WinAmp
>that synchronise display with the MP3, so just playing back without
>anything
>else running should be a breeze!
>
> The reason I say the graphics card is simple. In order to squeeze as
>much performance as possible from these cards they send just slightly more
>data to the card than it can take to try and push it. This results in the
>command being left in the data lines until the card is ready for it,
>meaning
>no other card can use those data lines until the graphics card is ready.
>Ordinarily this isn't too much of a problem - the chances of you noticing
>the printer pausing for a microsecond, or maybe the mouse locking for a
>very
>brief instant, or even the hard disc taking just that millisecond longer to
>read a file go pretty much unnoticed. With the sound card though it is
>clearly audible when this happens. If you have a WinModem it will be
>effected too - many people blame their ISP when they get disconnected, but
>actually it's the graphics card breaking communication. The solution is to
>nag the b****** off your graphics card manufacturer until you get some
>drivers that *don't* lock up the bus - either that or switch graphics
>cards.
Nope, you're definitely wrong there Magic. I have a PIII 500, 128 megs of
RAM, and my graphics card is on the AGP bus, not PCI and when I start an
application or even when the computer just puts the monitor in power save
mode, Winamp frequently does what seems to be playing the same fraction of a
second of music over and over again (if MP3s work on quantisation as well
then it could easily be one quantised section) or it skips bits. I assume
this is the same problem as with which the question originally started.
OK, i just did it then by starting the biggest program i have (3DS Max, but
i stopped it before the graphics were initialised) and according to the
system monitor, the only thing that was at 100% was processor useage, but
allocated memory came close. It's not that hard to use 100% of any processor
in my experience - that's why you have to wait for things to load.
I would theorise that winamp probably, for some reason, during playing would
decide that it needs more processing power, but some other program is using
it all, and there isn't any more.
Christopher Spalding
Genius, generally excellent and gifted person.
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