Folk wrote:
On Thu, 04 Aug 2005 00:50:23 GMT, bob brozewicz
wrote:



my question is this! does a sound card act as a video card where the
sound card will free cycles from the processor. when i play music using
windows media player my systems slows considerably when using other
applications at the same time such as firefox and thunderbird.


Yes. Onboard sound solutions (like your Realtek) use the CPU for
signal processing. The SBLive card has a built-in digital signal
processor that will offload the work from the CPU.

this is exactly what i have read so far.


Windows Media Player is probably a bit of a resource hog. I recommend
Winamp version 2.1. It's an older version but works great and has a
small footprint.


ill see if i can find/download from the winamp site. there is also a wmp
replacement on sourceforge that is open source and suppose to be lighter
on resource consumption. i'll try and find this one as well.

thanks for taking the time to responded to my post. much appreciated.

bob b.