A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization 'feature' of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.
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Member since:2006-01-17
I guess that kind of makes sense. But what doesn't make sense is why this wasn't a problem on XP. Or why I haven't heard skipping on any kind of audio in years on any system running any OS.
The last time I had media performance problems was when I was running Gentoo with Gnome on a '98 beige G3 in 2004 and trying to listen to music while something was emerging.
Has anyone else here had problems like this when not running Vista?
Edited 2007-08-27 23:00
Member since:2006-12-05
I've run Windows XP Pro for years since it came out, up until a couple years ago when I switched almost completely to Linux. Winamp was always my player of choice. I do recall several times when, under heavy loads, the music would basically keep looping a section of the song while heavily processing something else, but I honestly can't remember what it was hogging the resources or when it last happened; I don't even remember what programs were installed and what ones were running. All I know is that I think my lack of memory--only 256MB--is one of the biggest culprits; Windows is a memory hog, and seems to make bad use of its virtual memory.
This has also happened in previous Windows (9x) releases on different, older machines, although I remember even less about those... only that I was running Winamp back then, too.
Edit: Now that I think of it, it may have been buffer settings; I remember changing the buffer values to something higher than default, and this mostly corrected the problem if I remember right. So... well, I'm not quite sure...
Edited 2007-08-28 00:46
Member since:2006-06-21
Perhaps because XP was (and is) a rather stable product, whereas Vista is not. I don't understand why some people are amazed by the issues with Vista. It's common knowledge that any Windows should be still considered beta, no matter what Microsoft says, until at least SP1. People went and installed Vista in spite of this, yet now they complain of this and that. Why do that? What was so wrong with XP that they couldn't wait for Vista SP1? I don't know. Whatever. I guess someone's gotta do beta-testing for Vista and be the guinea-pig. So thanks to all current Vista users for a better SP1.
Edited 2007-08-28 12:53
Member since:2005-11-21
Thats not my experience. I've seen itunes choke playing mp3s on my Macs (g4 ibook, 2.16ghz c2d mbp, and 2.4ghz c2d imac). Doesn't take all that much. Do something that creates a lot of disk I/O and itunes will skip.
Itunes runs at the same nice level as everything else. Only a select few processes on OS X run with a nice level other than 0.
Member since:2006-02-05
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Member since:
2005-06-29
Can't say anything about Vista, but iTunes in MacOSX seems to employ similar philosophy, the music will play no matter what while other programs battle for their CPU/memory slots. It makes sense though, because you could be waiting for an app to do its thing in deaf silence or you could relax and keep listening to those tracks. After all equal priorities won't speed things all that much if at all...