Hoster Power Hungry

[xxyzz]

Hoster 4.0 and above seems to be very power hungry. My songs that are in cue take about 10-15 seconds to load. If while a song is loading and you try doing a search for any new songs the search box gets grayed out for a long while.
I have a pretty power laptop and have no background programs running. All are disable thru msconfig. I was wondering if maybe I needed to upgrade to a laptop with a 512mb graphics card as my currect graphics card only has 256mb. I have been keeping the resoulation on 1024x768 also but would like to increase it.

Dell 1720, 17 inch laptop
Intel Cor 2 Duo T7500 2.2 ghz 4m L2 Cache
3gb Ram 667 mhz
2x320 hard drives kma files on second drive
256mb NVIDIA GeForce 640G

[madjim- with the Lord]

What operating sytem are you using?

Have you made all of the changes that MTU reccomends for your operating system?

There is a site http://www.blackviper.com where you can find many operating system tweaks that will help.

Jim

[ddouglass]

Try changing from 32 bit (true Colors) to 16 bit colors. This will speed things up and won't be noticable to the singers.
What type of song files are you using? Are these files coming from an external or internal drive? And have you cleaned up and defragged your drives lately?

[xxyzz]

Running vista 32 bit. All suggested changes have been made. I switched my settings to 16 bit 1024x768 that did not make any difference. My cpu usage is very low about 8% with only hoster open (idle) being used and no songs being cued.. Memory is at 41%.
My kma files are on the laptop but I have two 320gb hard drives installed. Hoster is installed on one drive and the KMA files are installed on the other drive. I would not think this would be a problem. Most of my song are imported from CD's but 25% are from zip files.
The bottom line here is when I am cueing up kma files it takes 10-15 seconds to load and this never happened prior to 4.0 coming out. It is not that big od a deal but does slow down my searching for songs. I can live with it, I am just curious if anyone else was having the same problem and I am probably trying to convince myself to buy a better laptop. I am one of those fools that are always buying the newest thing out there. However if buying a new laptop with 512mb graphics card vs what i have now (256) is not going to make a difference than I won't bother.

[marklwood]

I was looking at my configuration to see if anything has changed. It appears that the last Vista update has made changes to my services. I would do as MadJim suggests and visit http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm and make some changes to see if you can alleviate the issues. All of my Media Center services were back on, and I know for sure that I didn't turn them back on. I would also suggest a registry cleaner. I use a paid one, but have had good luck in the past with http://www.ccleaner.com/ in the past. I am sure that you can get this back to tip-top shape in no time.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by xxyzz

Running vista 32 bit. All suggested changes have been made. I switched my settings to 16 bit 1024x768 that did not make any difference. My cpu usage is very low about 8% with only hoster open (idle) being used and no songs being cued.. Memory is at 41%.
My kma files are on the laptop but I have two 320gb hard drives installed. Hoster is installed on one drive and the KMA files are installed on the other drive. I would not think this would be a problem. Most of my song are imported from CD's but 25% are from zip files.

I take this is two dives internal to the laptop. I hope that means you have Hoster installed on the C: drive. If this is so then no having them split like that is not a problem. Do ZIP and CDG KMAs take the same amount of time to cue up?

Originally Posted by xxyzz

The bottom line here is when I am cueing up kma files it takes 10-15 seconds to load and this never happened prior to 4.0 coming out. It is not that big od a deal but does slow down my searching for songs. I can live with it, I am just curious if anyone else was having the same problem and I am probably trying to convince myself to buy a better laptop. I am one of those fools that are always buying the newest thing out there. However if buying a new laptop with 512mb graphics card vs what i have now (256) is not going to make a difference than I won't bother.

I am a little confused here. Are you saying when you press play the Cue time is 10-15 seconds or the time it takes to add a song from search to the playlist?
Just for information to help us roughly how many KMA files do you have?

[dspins]

Thank you for bringing this up. I was going to start a thread addressing this problem. Hoster has given me lots of problems with the new upgrade. When music is playing in media player now, hoster actually interupts it when doing a search of the singers song database or when trying to rip cd's where it never used to before.

I have also noticed now that hoster seems to screw up badly when you attempt to add a CD brought into your show, especially while a song is playing in hoster. Used to be able to do this flawlessly before. Now the song timing will get messed up or other glitches.

Even though I had pleanty of Ram before, thinking it might help I upped the computer from 1.5 to 4 gig. (yes I know XP pro only uses 3 of the 4) This did nothing for this issue. The only other issue I can possibly have is my raid array. I am thinking I need to pull both my drives out of the computer and double check that they are both 400 gig WD blacks. (fast drives)

I know they are making changes to make hoster more vista friendly, but I sure hope this is not at the expense of the loyal XP users. I hope someone can nail down what is causing hoster to become such a hog where it used to be able to run with multiple other programs in the backround at the same time. I would choose a program that runs smooth over one that looks nice and runs choppy any day.

Thank you in advance for all you guys do at MTU.

[xxyzz]

Originally Posted by ddouglass

I take this is two dives internal to the laptop. I hope that means you have Hoster installed on the C: drive. If this is so then no having them split like that is not a problem. Do ZIP and CDG KMAs take the same amount of time to cue up?

Hoster is installed on the C drive and the KMA files E drive both internalled stalled on the laptop.


I am a little confused here. Are you saying when you press play the Cue time is 10-15 seconds or the time it takes to add a song from search to the playlist?
Just for information to help us roughly how many KMA files do you have?

When I press play the time is 10-15 seconds.