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| CURRENT SERIES Music, Man All the technical details you need to get the most from digital music for your home and your earbuds. Sound cards and IRQs Optimizing & repairs AV system hookup Music servers Windows vs. Apple How compression works Codecs for dummies LPs to MP3 iPod survival skills iPod software ARCHIVES
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By Lou Dolinar Its iTunes misbehaving? Does MusicMatch snap, crackle and pop? Are your album rips less than perfect? Maybe its time for performance- tuning your PC. Last week we looked at how to fix an old PC bugaboo, the IRQ (Interrupt Request), which can cause problems for sound cards and music playback systems. This week we'll look at some basic tweaks for improving performance. You've probably had this happen: You're listening to an MP3 while surfing the Web, and hit a page with lots of graphics. Or maybe you recalculate a big spreadsheet. Suddenly your music is disrupted. The noise and sound dropouts you may be hearing occur because Windows, in its normal state, gives priority to what you're working on (the foreground process) rather than to a background process, in this case the unattended playback of music. The computer, in effect, is briefly "too busy" to play back music. The problem is highly variable - on a fast computer with lots of memory, it may happen rarely, if at all. Older systems, systems with lots of software running, systems bogged down with spyware or viruses, well, the disruptions can be serious. If you have a fancy network device streaming music from your PC (hint, I just got myself a Squeezebox), you may be ready to send it back. So what can you do? Assuming you've cleaned all the cybergunk from your computer, a subject we've covered at great length in earlier columns, you may want to adjust various Windows settings to change its priorities, or disable functions you don't absolutely need. These are pretty well buried in Windows XP, but we'll show you how to dig them up. The single simplest change to improve music playback is to change the PC's priorities. Your foreground applications may take a performance hit, but the change is easily reversible if you find your system is bogging down. Go to Start and open the Control Panel. Under Performance and Maintenance, chosehe System applet and click on the Advanced tab. You'll get a screen for adjusting Performance, User Profiles, and Startup and Recovery. Click on the Settings button for Performance. Your next window has two tabs that concern us. Under Advanced you have three options: Processor Scheduling, Memory Usage and Virtual Memory. Processor Scheduling is the first option to try. Under Adjust for Best Performance Of, switch from Programs to Background Services, click Apply and OK, and go back to your usual routine. If your sound stabilizes, you're home free. If that doesn't help, the other two options on the Performance Options windows are worth a shot. Set memory usage to System Cache. My system slowed down noticeably with this option checked, but you may have better results. You can also increase the amount of disk space that the computer can use as RAM under the Virtual Memory option. This isn't to be taken lightly, and I'd suggest you Google Virtual Memory and Windows XP before making your move. Note that the above tweaks are reallocating computing power, and won't, for example, improve gaming performance. On the other hand, you can get rid of some functions and improve performance across the board, provided you're willing to give up some of the aesthetics of Windows. In the Performance Options window, go to the Visual Effects tab. Normally, Windows will pick its own setting here. You want to check the button that says Adjust for Best Performance, which will clear the checkmarks and get rid of all the visual effects incorporated into the Windows interface. You'd be surprised how much computing power some of these little functions, such as showing the content of a Window while it's being dragged, can use up. About the only one I find critical is the option to smooth the edges of screen fonts, without which small type can be illegible on LCDs. There are other options that are both trickier and less effective but worth exploring if you have a half-day to kill and want to learn something useful. Windows XP often automatically starts processes that it doesn't absolutely need to operate. Weeding these out can be time-consuming but will free up memory and CPU cycles. Some useful links are Black Viper's Super Tweaks for Windows XP and Sound on Sound magazine's FAQ on optimizing XP for music.
[ALL EDITIONS] Newsday - Long Island, N.Y. Author: LOU DOLINAR Date: Feb 7, 2005 Start Page: A.29 Edition: Combined editions Section: BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY Text Word Count: 737 Document Text
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