WHY do my d&@#$% Windows machines hiccup...

.. every 5 seconds during audio and video playback? Win 98 or NT 4, it makes no difference, they all bloody hiccup. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE DAMN THINGS? This has been going on for ages and I am damned if I can find out why.

Have you turned off the feature that automatically scans the CD drive for an auto-run disc every 5 seconds?

I used to have this problem under NT4 and Win2K with certain version of Winamp, when the same version would behave just fine on the same machine under Win98. Never found out why. But that problem has long since disappeared.

If it's a CD, I would take Tony's suggestion into account. If this is file playback, any number of things could be the cause.

That's not quite what Tony's on about. You don't need to be listening to a CD to get the hiccups.

If you've got an old (and/or crap) CD-ROM drive, it doesn't provide media-insertion events to Windows. This means that, in order to implement AutoPlay, Windows needs to poll the CD-ROM drive periodically. Typically, this is done every 5 seconds.

Now, the crappy CD-ROM drive takes a while to decide whether there's a different CD in there, and also decides to lock down the IDE bus while handling the command. This means that nothing can happen for a fraction of a second, every five seconds.

You won't usually notice, but when playing music, you need reasonable throughput -- hiccups result.

This might not be the problem, but it's worth checking out.

Yeah, what he said.

Once again Tony, thank you for your knowledge. I was having the same issue when I tried to play video files off a CD. I went and disabled Auto-Run...no more problems.

Cool. Yeah, that's one of the ever-increasing list of things that I disable immediately upon installing Windows. Causes all sorts of problems. Of course, the option is somewhere different in every new version of Windows, and I think in most NT versions you have to do a registry hack to disable it (bastards).

Can someone tell me how to disable auto-run in XP? I went to device manager > CD drive properties, and there is nothing there.

Well, one way to do it is to go to "My Computer" and use the Auto-play tab (preferences>autoplay) for the selected device. This is kind of a pain, since you have to turn it off for multiple file types. I would think this cool, if I could specify the program each type activates... as it is, it's just annoying.

There may be a way to shut down auto-play system wide, but it's not in the supplied help, as far as I can see.

.....except that they're all SCSI based systems - no IDE anywhere - and they still hiccup... It's not just audio, it's video as well, and even in games while they're running, there's this minut e pause as th e playback halts ju st for a split sec ond.

[OT] Nice avatar! [/OT]

-Zeke

Thanks...love that movie.

Coolest thing I ever saw was years and years ago I was walking through Disneyland, and I saw this guy with the Auryn on a necklace.

I went up to him and said it was the coolest thing and where could I get it. He said a friend had MADE it for him. The thing looked perfect. It was solid metal too...quite heavy. I think it was about 3 inches in diameter.

Or you can just install TweakUI...

According to the page you linked to, those add-ons are for WinXP only. I'm running Win2K. Is there a version of these utilities for other versions of Windows, or can I just use the ones from that page?

Yes, there are versions of TweakUI for all current Windows platforms. Do some digging.

It's here.

Oh sure take the EASY way out...
(Brian slinks away embarrassed for not thinking of TweakUI.)

How does one make the default folder view "Details" in XP?

How does one make the default folder view "Details" in XP?

Same way as other recent Windows versions. Set one window to Details, and also set everything else you want. Go to Tools, Folder Options, and View. Click "Apply to All Folders".

A little expensive, but hey...

Yikes. It looks beautiful...but I really don't need it in 24k gold. Wonder if the guy makes cheaper ones.

I confess, I AGREE!!!!