Audio sounds as though it's skipping

[Lloyd Te Kani]

Have recently revived my laptop after it had crashed, changed from Vista back to XP, re-loaded Hoster and am currently in the process of downloading some 5000 songs into my hard drive.

My problem now is that when I play back a song it sounds as if the audio is skipping quite badly. The songs start off but there is an intermittent staccato noise and the audio slows noticeably and the lyrics are quite badly out of sync. It's as if there's a dirty disk in the player but this is not the case. There is no disk in the CD drive at all. This problem is occurring after the song has been downloaded.

Assistance would be appreciated guys.

Lloyd T

[ddouglass]

How much memory does the laptop have?
Check you Task Manager while playing a song. Look at Performance tab and see what percentage of Processor time is in use and how much memory is being used. Also look at the Processes tab and see just what else is running.
Another thing that may help is to defrag your hard drive. I know you just loaded XP, but I can tell you from experience that Microsoft is the worst for not loading their stuff cleanly.

[Lloyd Te Kani]

Thanks DD, will do all those things and let you know how it goes.

LT

[Lloyd Te Kani]

My laptop has 1GB of RAM and 160 GB HD. I've defragged the system and noticed with Task Manager that CPU usage fluctuates between 1 and 100%. Hoster is the only programme running at the time. Even after doing all these things, the audio is still the same, ie music starts and is then interupted by a sound like a machine gun firing and a corresponding and very noticeable slowing of the music and the lyrics are either well ahead or well behind the music.

Any ideas??

An exasperated Lloyd

[swany]

Open hoster. Go back to task manager, processes, right click hoster, set priorities to high. There are a lot of processes going on in the background, check the priorities they should be set at normal or below.

If you are running windows media player at the same time it does take a lot of memory, if this is the case make sure you have a lot of ram upgrade if necessary 1-2GB is good.

One other thing you can do is mute your windows sounds by clicking the mixer on the small speaker or vol control in the lower right of your screen.

Back to media player, don't run it above 90% if you have the WOW effects on turn it off.

Last but not least have you gotten all the XP patches? WMP 11 or 12? Upgrade all.

[Lloyd Te Kani]

I think I may have stumbled across the problem. It seems my computer no longer recognises my CD/DVD drive. I tried to rectify this by getting it to test for the drive repeatedly but no luck and then after rebooting a couple of times, I thought the only thing to do was to back-up all my programmes and then un-install and re-install Hoster. Unfortunately because the computer thinks it no longer has a CD/DVD drive I can'y do this from my disk.

So that's where I am at present. Any further printable suggestions please apart from telling me where to put it.

Lloyd