Broadband affecting CD playback and CD burning

[Wildrover]

I have been having problems with aspects of my PC performance for some time but have recently discovered the problem.

Two issues related to CD drive. Firstly, if I play music from the CD the playback is choppy and stuttered. Secondly if I am burning a CD I constantly get buffer underruns and wasted CDRs.

I worked out some time ago that if I switched off the broadband connection, anti-virus software and firewall the burning issue went away. However I discovered recently that the root cause of both problems is the broadband connection. If I disable the connection then both problems are cured.

What can I do to cure this without having to disable the broadband connection?

[poolking]

I doubt that a broadband connection would affect the performance of your PC, sure you haven't got other processes running in the background that you are unaware of?

[stuG]

Wildrover, If your connection is intermittantly having problems eg Browsing or downloading/uploading where it times out, I normally run a ping in the background, this will indicate there is indeed a problem. It may or may not be related to the speed test.

There are currrently a few threads regarding this issue, I suggest you have a look something in there might me able give you some clues and some ammunition to go to NTL with.

I suggest recording whom you speak to at ntl and get a call reference number, these will prove useful should you need to chase up you fault.

[stuG]

poolking, I have noticed it too, sometimes when the connection is dropped there is a lag on the pc and depending on the application this may exhibit the problem as described [Edit: Not always though granted]

Originally Posted by Wildrover

I have been having problems with aspects of my PC performance for some time but have recently discovered the problem.

Two issues related to CD drive. Firstly, if I play music from the CD the playback is choppy and stuttered. Secondly if I am burning a CD I constantly get buffer underruns and wasted CDRs.

I worked out some time ago that if I switched off the broadband connection, anti-virus software and firewall the burning issue went away. However I discovered recently that the root cause of both problems is the broadband connection. If I disable the connection then both problems are cured.

What can I do to cure this without having to disable the broadband connection?

to the forum Wildrover

- have you checked that you have DMA enabled for the drive?

[Kneebs]

What spec is the PC, and are you connecting by ethernet, or USB ? USB uses a bit of processing power from the CPU, so could slow it down if the pc aint the quickest...

[stuG]

Wildrover, quick check you can run non boardband related... If you are running XP, ctrl + alt + del and choose processes tabe, have a scan through to see what is using most cpu time and or mem usuage, end that task and see if it is any better.

If not running XP/2000 and say windows 95/98 or Me do a google search for process explorer and it will give u a snapshot of what is being used currently.

[Wildrover]

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I have a newish PC with 1GB Athlon processor.
The broadband is through an ethernet adaptor which is USB connected.

I have been rooting around in the system setup and have found the following:

DMA is on Channel 2 for floppy disk controller and Channel 4 for Direct Memory Access controller

I have 4 devices sharing the same IRQ: 2 USB ports, sound card and NVIDIA GeForce 2 (graphics card?). This doesn't quite stack up as the reason.

I have PCI bus and DMA controller sharing the same I/O address. I am not a hardware expert (!!) and PCI is a video adaptor isn't it?

Any further thoughts?

Originally Posted by Wildrover

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I have a newish PC with 1GB Athlon processor.
The broadband is through an ethernet adaptor which is USB connected.

I have been rooting around in the system setup and have found the following:

DMA is on Channel 2 for floppy disk controller and Channel 4 for Direct Memory Access controller

I have 4 devices sharing the same IRQ: 2 USB ports, sound card and NVIDIA GeForce 2 (graphics card?). This doesn't quite stack up as the reason.

I have PCI bus and DMA controller sharing the same I/O address. I am not a hardware expert (!!) and PCI is a video adaptor isn't it?

Any further thoughts?

There is a seperate setting, confusingly also called 'DMA' that is accessed via the properties for the CD drive in device manager, it's a check box on the 'settings' page - if it hasn't got a tick in, then tick it, & click 'OK', which will then tell you you have to restart your pc. After the restart, have a look to see that the box is still ticked.

I wouldn't worry about the interrupt sharing, modern pc's do this by design.

[Chris W]

If you have an ethernet card in the momdem then you should use that instead of the usb -> ethernet adaptor.

Are you using winXP? if it is 98 or me check the system resources (right click my computer, properties, performance)

ideally you want 85% or higher

if it is lower than this, check out www.sysinfo.org/startuplist and have a look at start-> run-> msconfig and see what is running that you can end

oh... and welcome to the site

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Wildrover

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I have a newish PC with 1GB Athlon processor.
The broadband is through an ethernet adaptor which is USB connected.

Any further thoughts?

The above.

The processor is not the fastest, though perfectly adequate, but making it do all the IP packet processing on top of all these other tasks may cause the problem you have.

Do you have a NIC card on your PC? If not get one, shouldn't cost more than a tenna

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=42061

Ebuyer PCI 10/100 Network Card Retail Box
Our Price £2.30 inc VAT

That should solve your problems.

[paulyoung666]

what make / model of cd writer is it , and how old is it ???????