Gremlins Emerge with Switch to Windows 7

PC's come out of the box as a jack of all trades (or master of none). To get them to perform as a music server you basically are doing what any good stock car racer has to do... strip out the useless parts for a performance vehicle from the standard factory model and replace highway performance parts with speed oriented parts.
Needless to say most don't want "race car" compromises in a comfortable suburban ride.

Wow am I glad I found this thread. I have a old Dell laptop that runs like a snail in wet cement, but the sound is phenominal thru my Benchmark USB DAC. I was thinking of getting a new(er) version for the speed and screen but now I am haveing serious 2nd thoughts.
-John

Re "comfortable suburban ride"

Comfort is the enemy of enthusiasm and the root of all mediocrity.

Long live enthusiasts and AUDIOgon,

Still hard to isolate this problem, but - whatever I do with the power settings - it seems like it is exacerbated when I am using more than one application.

Alternatively, if I close everything down and play just say, Foobar, for example I seem to get less skipping and sputtering.

Does this suggest a "kernel mixer" mixing problem?

I hope it is not too much to ask that I would like clean, clear, sputter free audio, whether I am listening to music or to Windows sounds.

Thanks for any updates.

Al,

You were right - but I made a mistake when I first tried to implement your fix.

I spent some time changing the power settings and choosing the preset menu for "maximum performance" and making sure that the sleep and hibernate features etc were all disabled.

As I mentiioned, things seemed better. But today was the worst sputtering and popping ever, despite "maximum performnance" power settings.

In the end - and you also mentioned this - the real culprit seems to be not the various sleep and hibernation options, but primarily the "throttling" of the CPU which is only found buried in the "advanced power settings."

So when the CPU options are expanded and set to minimum performance = 100 - that seemed to - at last - solve the problem, at least for now. It was otherwise unlistenable much of the time.

I will be curious to see if changing the CPU setting ONLY, while otherwise allowing the machine to sleep, hibernate etc might also work.

Thanks again and I hope this helps other Windows 7 64 bit users.