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I am running OtsAV on Windows XP. The way it works is by buffering a small amount of data from the hard drive just before it needs to play it. It used to give flawless sound no matter what else was happening on the computer but recently the audio becomes choppy when another application is very busy.

My old 1GBTB hard drive crashed so I reinstalled XP on a new 1.5GBTB hard drive and copied the data across. The new HD is only 30% full but before I defragged it, it was 100% fragmented. Defragging seemed to help initially but the problem has returned just as bad, if not worse.

I am running a lot of applications but the total CPU usage is only about 20% on average. Has my HD speed reduced because it's a larger drive (therefore further for the heads to travel between reads)? It doesn't make sense that some program is hogging the CPU because I don't see any spikes in the CPU Usage History graph. It doesn't seem to be my anti-virus because disabling it makes no difference.

My browser runs slowly at the same time as the audio break-ups but that seems to be a symptom, not a cause, as there is no unusual IO activity when it happens. OtsAV's priority is set to "Realtime" and all the other processes I've checked so far are set to "Normal".

If I run no other programs it's fine, but I want to use my computer for productivity while playing music! The big downwards spike in the graph below coincided with the worst audio break-up but not all spikes were accompanied by audio glitches, only about five of them.

HD Tune results

EDIT

  • RAM: 4GB (3GB usable by Windows)
  • CPU: Intel Core2 6420 @ 2.13 GHz
  • Motherboard: ASUS P5VD2-X

It's not:

  • Opera (using huge amounts of memory due to the number of tabs I have open, but no audio glitches)
  • Firefox
  • MS Outlook 2010
  • MS Word 2010 (I had it open briefly but it's currently not running)

I suspect it's Komodo Edit due to the number of files I have open. Every time it gets switched to it checks to see if the files have changed on disk. This is most likely the cause of my hard drive thrashing. I'll try starting it and see if the audio becomes choppy again.

It's not Komodo Edit. I had also disabled Java Quick Starter and the whole computer is faster after a rebootcrash, i.e. applications start faster. Maybe that was it? I'll post again if the choppiness comes back.

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  • Your disk us 1,5 TB, not 1,5 GB. Is the filesystem NTFS or FAT32? NTFS might give you some improvement. Also consider making a separate partition for your (audio)data so that fragmentation of you OS doesn't interfere with your (audio)data. You sure the HDD is the limiting factor and not your CPU? Can you post more specs of your system setup (RAM, CPU, motherboard). Finally: check the BIOS settings of your HDD.
    – agtoever
    Aug 29, 2014 at 5:21
  • Yes, you're right. I always do that! It comes from starting with 8-bits computers with 64KB RAM. Anything more than that confuses me! The file system is NTFS. Or were you just being cheeky? Would a separate partition help as it would still have to get the data off the same physical drive?
    – CJ Dennis
    Aug 29, 2014 at 5:33

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