Help. Intermittant loss of sound on file based system.

[brian2957]

Brian, are you doing anything else on the laptop at the time this is occurring or is it purely acting as a music player? Also how long is your USB cable and have you changing it lately?

The only times I have encountered stuttering play on a laptop are as follows;

Long USB cable (3m)
Poor quality USB cable
Playback via a NAS whilst doing other things on the network
Screen-savers or power management kicking in - even the display blanking has induced a very short break in play.
Using a mouse

TBH I don't believe a fragmented file would cause this.

Are you able to monitor the laptop to see if there are any clues and does the HDD activity light operate at the time you get break up? As John has outlined the likely cause is that Windows is doing something else in the background. I would open up the Task Manager and monitor the CPU activity and see if you get spikes at the same time as the breaks? If the hardware is working the cause is more likely going to be a software issue and some sort of conflict or lack of system resources.

How much RAM has the laptop and how much is being used during playback, also what's the normal CPU activity? These can again be checked in Task Manager by right clicking the taskbar. Click the performance tab and you should see a Window like this one:



It will be slightly different, as this is from Windows 7, but you should suss it out. If you know how to do all this already, please excuse me.

Finally, what else is installed on the laptop that is likely to be running at the same time - can you let us know what's in the system tray, i.e. the small icons located at the bottom right of the task-bar near the clock?

Try John's suggestions too and report back

Hi Tim , the music files are permenantly on the laptop .I'm usindg a QED USB cable. I also use a wireless mouse which I tried disconnecting but still the same . Don't know how to get into task manager I'm afraid . The laptop should have wireless capability and I was mucking around with this without success before new year , I don't know if this would cause the problem . On the subject of power management can you please tell me what is the ideal setting in your opinion.
Thanks for your help mate.
Brian.
Managed to get into task manager , looks quite similar to your graph . Can you tell me if I can give you some of the figures from this if it will help. Thanks.

[Welder]

Right Brian, you've got some system services interrupting the audio stream.
It's not terminal.

If you have an Anti Virus running, stop that.
If you have Windows Update manager running stop that.

Have you tried Fidelizer?
Give that try. It wont break anything as it doesn't install in the system files.
Just bear in mind what i mentioned above about unchecking the "make such and such my home page"

Dont worry if Fidelizer hangs a bit at system shutdown for the moment.

[brian2957]

Right Brian, you've got some system services interrupting the audio stream.
It's not terminal.

If you have an Anti Virus running, stop that.
If you have Windows Update manager running stop that.

Have you tried Fidelizer?
Give that try. It wont break anything as it doesn't install in the system files.
Just bear in mind what i mentioned above about unchecking the "make such and such my home page"

Dont worry if Fidelizer hangs a bit at system shutdown for the moment.

Hi John I tried Fidelizer but didn't work . I will check your other suggestions .
Right , no anti virus installed , windows update manager switched off , and home page switched to blank.

[Welder]

Hmm, if you’ve got task manager up and running Brian then leave it open while you play music; minimize the music player and run task manager full screen.

What you’re looking for is a system process that suddenly uses a lot more memory and then goes back to a normal state. Very roughly any process that goes above 40.000K may well be the problem.


(its times like this that internet relay chat really is useful)

[brian2957]

Hi John , been watching this for 20 mins and can't see any of processes which become erratic when glitch appears.
Brian.

[Welder]

It is possible that you have a failing RAM.
Use this to test
http://hcidesign.com/memtest/

It is also possible that you have a virus.
Run a scan.

As you mentioned, as a last resort a complete reinstall of Windows is always an option. This should at least remove any problem software provided you do a hard drive format and reinstall and not a Windows repair.
It can sometimes be quicker than finding a problem.

(running out of ideas now )

[Tim]

Before committing to a re-install, what about trying a different player to see if the problem is consistent?

Without going to the trouble of setting up and understanding foobar or another player, VLC will play WAV files and it's very easy to use Brian - just a thought

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[Welder]

Before you go for the reinstall process and /or heave the computer out of the window try reinstalling the media player you use.

I think this is a decent uninstaller for Windows. Use Advanced mode…..carefully.
http://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_..._download.html

Ah, Tim types quicker. Or what Tim suggests.

[dave2010]

Brian

OK - thanks for letting us know about the spare disk space. You should have plenty, so that rules that out. Could still be worth running defrag and anti-virus to make sure the disk is clean.

Is there any chance of us taking a peek at the processes you're running from the Task Manager? It looks as though the CPU usage is reasonable from the graph, but there might be processes which kick in from time to time which are disrupting the system. Perhaps pay particular attention to processes which use a lot of CPU (even if only sporadically) or have large Page Fault values (or deltas). You might have to spend some time with a search engine to check whether each process is an allowed/approved one, before deciding what to do.

If a process is causing the problem, then this can be tested by killing the process and seeing if things improve - though it's not good to just kill off any process without some checks to see what it's supposed to do. If the problem can be isolated to a single process, the next step after that is to prevent that process from running from start-up. Cross that bridge if that does turn out to be the most likely reason. Some of the others have also given perfectly good possible causes, so you now have to work through these fairly slowly/methodically until you find something which works.

The advice to remake the system may be a really good one if you've not got too much on it already, and if you have the appropriate disks to make that possible. If you've installed lots of programs, even if you don't use them all the time, then it'll be quite a pain having to reinstall all over again, so in that case I'd recommend not rushing to remake the system. Some of my friends had a problem which went away when they decided to give up and do a clean update install of Windows 7.

Seems to me that you are making progress, and at least eliminating some possibilities from the enquiries.

Good luck with this.

[brian2957]

John , TIM and Dave , sorry Ididn't get back to you all sooner , I went to bed and slept on the problem . I had an XP disc in the cupboard and am re-installing XP as I write this ( I think ) . I will let you know how I get on when installation is complete and I reload some of my music files amd try them .
Many thanks again .
Brian.