Topic: Popping sound during desktop playback

[tfs8271]

Recently, I have been experience random excessive popping sounds and uneven play back while playing  music from my desktop through my digital receiver. I would get very occasionally pops about every few songs and it didn't bother me. I can't even listen to it know as it is so frequent and almost has a skipping sound to it. As I'm typing, I have no music playing but I still getting the random popping through the head phones.

Could it be not enough RAM? I only have 512. Just a thought.

[boojum]

I think that 1 GB is the recognized minimum these days.  You will see an exciting speedup in performance.  Well, I always have when running it up to 1 GB.

I would also try cleaning up your registry.  I had erratic problems in playback., ran a registry cleaner and things are better now.  The one I used was free: http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.html.  It may also help you, especially if you install and uninstall a lot of stuff.

Cheers

[cheshirecat]

Could it be not enough RAM? I only have 512. Just a thought.

You can check while you're playing a file.  Go to Task Manager (easiest is to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and choose Task Manager from the dialog box), go to the performance tab look at the box on the bottom left [Commit Charge (K)].  The total is the amount that the computer is currently using, Limit is the amount of your physical RAM + Virtal memory size, and Peak is the most that has been used by the machine since the last reboot.  If your Commit Charge Total (or Peak for that matter) is larger than your Physical Total (from the top right box) then you should add memory, if not, your problems may lie elsewhere.

It's probably a good idea to bump yourself up to 1G, I believe XP pro idles with about 200-300MB in use, so that doesn't leave a tone of memory for other things.

Also it's good practice to make sure that your Virus Scan is up to date and has an auto-updater installed to keep any nasties out.

[tfs8271]

Four months later..........

Bad digital signal to the receiver.  More than likely the optical cable is bad.  Just happened to look at the digital light on the receiver and it was flickering during the pops.

Running mini to RCA with no issues.

[Nick's Picks]

fwiw...
I run XPpro on a 933mhz system with 256mb of RAM and play 24bit music just fine through my chaintek card.