Help! This never happened before.

P

Ptron

New member
When trying to mix down to Sound Forge, the computer will hang up breifly causing glitches on my recording that sound like a scratched CD. You can hear the hang ups if you listen to the hard drive while recording.

eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh...eh eh eh eh eh eh eh...eh eh eh, and so on.

This is a new problem. I've recorded a bunch of stuff before with no problems, but until last night, its been a month or two since I've done any recording. The only program I recall adding in that time was the Napster thing. It did seem to cause some problems so I uninstalled it. Could it have left something behind that's mucking things up? These constant little hang ups seem to be happening elsewhere too. Most noticably when I open or close something.

I've defraged the hard drive and checked out the recommendations I've seen for CD-R buffer underrun (is this the same thing?) but to no avail. Please help if you can. Thanks.

Ptron
 
This could be a number of problems. Make sure you have no other programs running during the recording. Also make sure your sound card drivers are the right ones or arnt corrupted. There are many ways of opimizing your computer for recording. make sure you disable any write-behind-caching. Also one thing i like to do to speed stuff up, is put alot of virtual memory. i usually load up to 2000MB but you could try more. But it depends. Also, make sure you have the autorun on your cd-rom. But this all depends on if your running windows 98 or 2000. Also, take out network cards if you have any, they seem to slow stuff down like that.
 
I don't have any programs running that I know about. I'm sure it's not a soundcard problem since the hangups appear in other aspects of operation. I have no network cards or anything like that. I'm at 1840MB of virtual memory. I haven't changed any settings and it used to record fine. It never once skipped. This problem just showed up around the same time I installed/uninstalled Napster. That's why I'm suspicious of that. When I had napster installed it would open up AOL on it's own a few minutes after I logged off! It's not just a recording problem but in other areas it's just an annoyance whereas I'm screwed for recording until I figure this out. THERE! That's another symptom. Sometimes it beeps when I type. What's going on?!

I sould mention that I'm only talking about 2 trks to the hard drive, not multi-track or any on-the-fly to CD stuff.

Ptron
 
The short and thick of it is....

I would back up all pertinent data you want to keep, files and what not, fdisk your drive, then reinstall.

This time around, keep away from Napster! :) It is evil anyway....:)

Also, I think that it is a common consensus amoung people that use computers a lot that AOL is possibly the most invasive non-Microsoft Internet Explorer application under the sun. It seems to latch on to all system resources, and has been known to have significant issues with bogging down a computer. Frankly, I don't think it is worth it. If you want to keep your AOL email and users lists, etc....you might try their non-broweser dial up account that they have now. I believe it works sort of like dialup networking or something like that, and is supposed to be a whole lot less invasive to your system. From there, just use IE 5 or Netscape for browsers, and Outlook Express for email.

It would appear possibly that Napster's application possibly had a little application in it that likes to report back to the server. I have not heard of this being an issue, but there are many other freeware applications on the market that do this, and maybe that would explain why your AOL is getting dialed up after you closed it. It is an idea, and a great conspiracy theory to boot! :) But, don't be surprised that it may be the case.

Also, I don't think most people who have followed AOL over the years would deny that AOL users have a much better chance of getting viruses on their machines. AOL claims to have excellent security, but, it would seem that many of it's users have bugs, viruses, etc......I am sure there are many that don't, and certainly there are many who don't use AOL that get viruses, and have bugs in their system. But, I have found a far greater percentage of AOL users who have computer problems. Many just don't realize it because they are used to how bad their computer works. I remember doing a complete reinstall for a friend, and we ditched the AOL. Over a year and a half later, she still marvels at how much better her computer works. It is as fast and usable today as it was a year and a half ago. But she had to reinstall many times when using AOL to get things working again for a short time....:)

Oh, by the way, have you defragmented your hard drive lately?

But I still say, reinstall your OS and applications. There is a possibility that Napster changed some basic settings on your machine that may be hard to track down. Usually, unless you want to spend the money for someone to look over your setup, reinstall is the cheapest and easiest thing to do.

Good luck.

Ed
 
*sigh*

I was afraid someone was going to say that. This will be the third time I've had to reinstall everything but the symptoms are always different. I'm scared to try it because last time I had big problems reinstalling stuff. Not to mention it takes forever. I'd never heard that aol could be a problem. Oh well.

Thanks,
Peter

p.s. Is there a server any of you folks recommend?
 
Well, since you asked...:)

Just about any Internet Service Provider will be better then AOL!

Internet Explorer 5.0 is pretty much the standard browser nowadays.

Sorry for the bad news buddy. I just try to tell it how it is. I just happen to think the internet and computers in general would be much better off without AOL....:)

AOL I am sure has gone to great lengths to hide the fact that their software is problematic to many computers. Up until version 5.0, the browser they used was based upon a 1980's browser. Things have changed alot over the years ya know? :)

Hey, in a year and a half, I have installed my OS and applications over a dozen times trying to get it right, and I have never even used AOL! Granted, I demand that my machine work at a very high level, and have many friends that I can consult with to guage how it is doing. So, if you are only on a third install, and you are trying to do audio on that machine, consider yourself lucky! :)

Trust me, it will all be good once you get the AOL off the machine. I believe too that you would benefit from not installing too many different applications on your machine too. If you are using a Windows 9X operating system, you will find that you cannot load a wide variety of software on it without having some problems.

You might consider NT 4 or Windows 2000 if you want to effectively run a wide variety of applications on the same machine without it crashing on you about 3 times a day....:) Really! I run a triple boot system here with 95 (only for my ADAT card since it doesn't have NT drivers), NT 4, and 2000 on it. 95 crashes pretty easily, but NT 4 and 2000 are pretty much bullet proof!

But, before you consider NT or 2000 as your OS, you will need to see if all your hardware has NT or 2000 drivers available. The more quality hardware will have them. There is some good stuff too that doesn't run on NT platforms, but, as a general rule, it the hardware doesn't have NT drivers, it probably has some issues in it's design that should be suspect! You may want to upgrade any hardware that doesn't run on NT or 2000 to stuff that does. Trust me when I say that the benefits in stability are significant!

Good luck.

Ed
 
Just a suggestion, Ptron

If you hate re-formating and re-installing everything several times a year (which I think is a good idea at least every 6 months or so), then get a program like Ghost. Makes it very easy to recover an operating system and all applications in a matter of minutes. Format the drive, install the OS, install and configure the applications that you deem essential, then you can use Ghost or another cloning program to make a CD of the entire installation and store it somewhere. Then when you start having problems, just restore from that cloned image and you're back to a fresh install much quicker than doing it all manualy. Only problem I have with this is when I make some change or update to an app, then overwrite that when I forget the image hasn't been updated. Still easier for me to redo the application upgrades than to completely reinstall everything.
 
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