repeating sound problem...

I have seen lots of forums which mention IRQ conflicts, I think I have
lots of sharing irq's, but I'm unable to change them.

Lots of people are confused on this subject; probably because in the distant
past before PCI, sharing interrupts was a no-no. The ISA bus couldn't handle
it; it crashed the computer. PCI is designed to handle this though, so don't
worry.

Yes, sometimes buggy cards/drivers screw stuff up, but I haven't heard of a
card in years and years that did not support sharing. Microsoft WHQL
certification could of course never be awarded to a driver for a card that
had problems with IRQ sharing, and as recent MS operating systems includes
SBLive drivers this is not the case here.

After all the stuff you seem to have tried, you are coming closer and closer
to the point where a full OS re-installation will be required. Of course,
this is a lot of grief if it won't solve your problem, so before going there
you should try your soundcard in another computer first. Possibly try an
identical Live in your box too, if it can be arranged.

"Lenny" wrote in message
...

I have seen lots of forums which mention IRQ conflicts, I think I have
lots of sharing irq's, but I'm unable to change them.

Lots of people are confused on this subject; probably because in the distant
past before PCI, sharing interrupts was a no-no. The ISA bus couldn't handle
it; it crashed the computer. PCI is designed to handle this though, so don't
worry.

Yeah Creative Labs cards are naughty when it comes to PCI card design rules.

"Lenny" wrote in
:


I have seen lots of forums which mention IRQ conflicts, I think I
have lots of sharing irq's, but I'm unable to change them.

Lots of people are confused on this subject; probably because in the
distant past before PCI, sharing interrupts was a no-no. The ISA bus
couldn't handle it; it crashed the computer. PCI is designed to handle
this though, so don't worry.

Yes, sometimes buggy cards/drivers screw stuff up, but I haven't heard
of a card in years and years that did not support sharing. Microsoft
WHQL certification could of course never be awarded to a driver for a
card that had problems with IRQ sharing, and as recent MS operating
systems includes SBLive drivers this is not the case here.

After all the stuff you seem to have tried, you are coming closer and
closer to the point where a full OS re-installation will be required.
Of course, this is a lot of grief if it won't solve your problem, so
before going there you should try your soundcard in another computer
first. Possibly try an identical Live in your box too, if it can be
arranged.



Thanks for that Lenny, I wont worry about IRQ's then.

I have just switched on the PC, disabled the antivirus and then played
music for over an hour with no problems and no other programs running
(Besides the fire wall and solatair) When I switched on Xnews I started
to get the problem, This is pointing me towards some sort of hard drive
issue (Or possibly power) as I have a SATA 200gig drive and 2 IDE hard
drives 40 and 20gig. I have also got a 450W power supply I think this is
enough?.

All of the programs are on the C drive, but Xnews is on E: I am planning
to use the SATA drive for the operating system and only use the other
drives for storage (Im waiting on a DVD wriiter which is in the post as
well speak.) So I will be able to test the power theory and drives, when
I backup the important stuff.

I will leave this problem, for a few weeks, and post a gain if the
problem persists after the reconfiguration of the drives.

At least I know I can play stuff without the problem, I just need to
reboot and ony use the media player.

Thanks to all who replied.

Brin

"D.R." D.R. @ NZ wrote in :


"Lenny" wrote in message
...

I have seen lots of forums which mention IRQ conflicts, I think I
have lots of sharing irq's, but I'm unable to change them.

Lots of people are confused on this subject; probably because in the
distant past before PCI, sharing interrupts was a no-no. The ISA bus
couldn't handle it; it crashed the computer. PCI is designed to
handle this though, so don't worry.

Yeah Creative Labs cards are naughty when it comes to PCI card design
rules.



Thanks D.R.

See the reply above for my progress!

I will post in a week or two when I solve the problem (Fingers crossed)

Brin

Yeah Creative Labs cards are naughty when it comes to PCI card design
rules.

Yeah, people say that too, personally though I never had a problem with any
of my creative PCI cards... Not even with the first generation of sblives
coupled with the documented crappy VIA Apollo MVP chipset.

If there ever was a problem (and not user error or such), I would expect
them to be gone now, considering how many revisions the Emu10k1/2 chips have
gone through. Should be nuttin to worry about. IRQ sharing is NORMAL in a
PC.

Thanks for that Lenny, I wont worry about IRQ's then.

Let's just say IRQs *could* be the reason for your problems, I just don't
think it's very likely. Hardware shares IRQs left and right these days,
if it was a major problem with that on creative hardware, we'd have millions
of people complaining about the same issue.

When I switched on Xnews I started
to get the problem, This is pointing me towards some sort of hard drive
issue

Have you noticed a lot of stuttering when your harddrive is working? I
haven't read all of your posts so I don't know if you mentioned that before.
There's several reasons harddrives (or any device that ties up the CPU for
too long, but harddrives are probably the most common) can cause stuttering
in a system.

The way most modern sound players work is they have some buffer memory that
they decompress a MP3 or whatever into, then does a function call to
directsound that makes the soundcard driver tell the soundcard to fetch that
sound data via PCI busmaster DMA. This all takes place within milliseconds.
While the soundcard plays the buffer - which is typically a few tenths of a
second up to a few seconds in length - the player decompresses the next
chunk of the MP3 into a new buffer, and when the first buffer has been
finished, the player program calls directsound to play the new buffer
instead and the process starts all over again.

NOW, if any step in this process is interrupted for whatever reason, the
buffer currently playing will start to repeat over and over - sound will
"stutter". Some reasons for this can be:

* IDE CDROMs spinning up when accessed - this often locks the IDE interface
for access for as much as several seconds, so the sound player will starve
when it can't read more MP3 data.
* Programs running at high priority for long periods of time (could be
malware/viruses, but you said you were protected from that), virus software
that functions poorly *cough*Norton Antivirus*ahem* (try NOD32 instead;
BLAZING fast, and cheap - Microsoft themselves use this one), system
processes running amuck - if you have winxp, bring up the process manager
via the ctrl-alt-del menu and check to see if you have anything that uses a
great deal of CPU time.
* Poorly configured hardware. If your IDE interfaces are running in software
mode (PIO - programmed I/O) rather than DMA mode, your CPU does all the work
of shuffling data back and forth. This leads to poor disk performance and
poor system response, especially under load. Do you know how to check for
this?

(Or possibly power) as I have a SATA 200gig drive and 2 IDE hard
drives 40 and 20gig. I have also got a 450W power supply I think this is
enough?

Heh. Oh yeah, it's enough alright. You should see all the crap I power from
my 250W power supply. Within going into too much detail, it's a 1.7 P4
CPU, 512M RDRAM (runs really hot), all 5 PCI slots filled with 6th PCI
device integrated on mobo - NIC interface. 2 harddrives + 2 optical drives,
Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card and about 10 USB devices. So 450W should
last most people quite a while!

If you're worried about power, just disconnect all harddrives other than the
one with your windows boot partition on it, but it should either just work
or not work at all. When running, a typical harddrive only draws about 5-7
watts of power, and if there's not enough of that, first thing that would
happen would likely be the CPU crashing. Not sound stuttering.

Hmmm, stupid computers! So many things to cause problems )


* IDE CDROMs spinning up when accessed - this often locks the IDE
interface for access for as much as several seconds, so the sound
player will starve when it can't read more MP3 data.

This could be the culprit


(try NOD32 instead; BLAZING fast, and cheap - Microsoft themselves use
this one)

I will look out for this as well.

system processes running amuck - if you have winxp, bring up the
process manager via the ctrl-alt-del menu and check to see if you have
anything that uses a great deal of CPU time.

No serious problems here, (Xnews is using about 150Mb, but I have 786Mb)

The sound stutter/repeat coincides with the Kernel "spiking" on the
performance graph.


* Poorly configured hardware. If your IDE interfaces are running in
software mode (PIO - programmed I/O) rather than DMA mode, your CPU
does all the work of shuffling data back and forth. This leads to poor
disk performance and poor system response, especially under load. Do
you know how to check for this?

Nope, fraid I dont know how to check this, lol, this is turning into a
dummies guide (I thought DMA only applied to CD Drives) My two IDE drives
are Very old, one is about 6 years and the other about 4 years, And they
have been used almost constantly!!

Heh. Oh yeah, it's enough alright. You should see all the crap I power
from my 250W power supply. Within going into too much detail, it's
a 1.7 P4 CPU, 512M RDRAM (runs really hot), all 5 PCI slots filled
with 6th PCI device integrated on mobo - NIC interface. 2 harddrives +
2 optical drives, Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card and about 10 USB
devices. So 450W should last most people quite a while!

If you're worried about power, just disconnect all harddrives other
than the one with your windows boot partition on it, but it should
either just work or not work at all. When running, a typical harddrive
only draws about 5-7 watts of power, and if there's not enough of
that, first thing that would happen would likely be the CPU crashing.
Not sound stuttering.

I thought that a shut down would be more likely if there was a power
shortage. But hey a 250W! I must be ok then.

I will try this when I am putting the new DVD writter in, after wireing
all these speakers around the room it is difficult to get access to the
pc, I will check the drive thing when I open the box next week.

Brin