Sound Issue

I have posted in the Sound Card forum but I thought in case someone could help me here.

Specs:
AMD 1GHz
MSI K7T Pro2-a
256MB ram
WinME

Here is my issue:
I will continually receive choppiness in my sound output. For example, when I first boot up the welcome sound of ME freezes up, this lasts only a second or so. Or another example, I am listening to an MP3 and downloading a file @ the same time when the file reaches 100% the MP3 will freeze up (almost sounds like a CD skipping). A similar thing will occur when playing UT. With the specs of my CPU I figured this shouldn't happen. I have updated Win and Media Player, I tried updating the SB live drivers but ME did not allow me saying it has not been tested by MS. Any tips are appreciated. Thanks a lot.

Is the sound card sharing an irq with any other devices? Do you have a cheap sounda crd to install for puropses of testing?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

I'm in agreement with Raystonn. It sounds a lot like IDE-DMA isn't enabled.

See, when you d/l a file in IE5.x, it gets downloaded first to a temporary location, bit by bit. Lack if IDE-DMA isnt going to hurt you much there. But when the download is finished, IE finally copies the entire file at once to the location you really wanted it downloaded to. At that point, IDE-DMA does become important--you're transferring a large block of data at once. If you don't have IDE-DMA enabled, then your CPU is going to be completely sucked up doing that file transfer. On a dual PIII-1GHz, CPU usage jumps to >85%, and sustained disk transfer rates are capped at ~5MB/sec. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is, it's spinning in a busy-wait loop polling the much slower I/O subsystem.

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

I believe you enable DMA in the Device Manager--it should be a checkbox somewhere in the "Properties" dialog box for your hard drive.

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

This is what this forum should be about. People helping people. I thought for sure we'd see some jack-off say something totally useless like "You've got AMD, that's your problem!" I was very glad to see some nice genuine help given here. My applause go to those who posted here.

--
Free us from these chains, let us slip these bonds and touch the sky with our imagination.