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Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?

Posted by kdawson on from the sound-of-your-network-on-vista dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the months since Vista's release, there has been no doubt about the reduced level of network performance experienced compared to Windows XP. However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed. It's a tough one for users — what do you pick, sound or speed? So much for multi-tasking."

4 of 748 comments (clear)

  1. Not a hardware issue, and may not DRM, either by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those of you thinking this is a hardware or a driver issue, RTFA. In the posts in this thread, many many different hardware combinations were tried, including one guy who used USB audio hardware. Sorry, but it ain't a hardware or driver issue...it's almost certainly a flaw or a bug in Vista.

    Could be DRM, maybe, but that's just speculation. One guy said he stripped the audio from a video and played just the video, so I'm not certain it's DRM, either.

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  2. Re:how on earth? by torkus · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's great but my Pentium 1 - 133Mhz CPU could play MP3s. The tiny 'couple mW' CPU in the ipod shuffle can play MP3s. You expect me to believe that a modern computer is having CPU contention issues over the processing power to play a MP3? Even with the bloatware that is know as Vista...playing a MP3 can't need more power than opening Excel or Word.

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  3. Re:DRM strikes again? by smooc · · Score: 5, Informative

    It more or less is actually. The design of the new audio infrastructure is indeed partially done because of DRM

    See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx

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  4. Re:DRM strikes again? by Bazar · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Actually more likely is the services which handles media getting more cpu time is doing just that, prioritising the audio over the network. Or, it could be HD sound they're playing which is clogging up the limited bandwidth on the PCI bus." Modern pc's, use a gigabit controler, to offload the bandwidth and processing, before it reaches the pci bus.

    Unless your using a pci network card, or a fairly old/cheap motherboard, it should have nothing to do with the available bandwidth on the pci bus
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