Distorted, Choppy SoundAll of a sudden, my PC had started to distort the sound of playback of anything, even the internal Windows “bonks.” Especially it would no longer allow me to play one piece of music off my network drive whilst ripping another, but any activity, especially disk activity caused the music to take a back seat only getting attention in the gaps. Awful! There may have been some impact on the overall performance as well.
The solution was totally unexpected but made a little sense in hind-sight. Some time earlier I had trouble writing a CD-ROM creating a coaster. It seems that in the process of all the errors, Windows in its wisdom, had downgraded my IDE controller which contained both the writer and the hard drive.
This can be confirmed by looking at Right Click “My Computer” / Hardware / Device Manager; then expand “IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers” and Right Click “Primary IDE Channel” selecting Properties. The Advanced Settings tab would show Content Transfer Mode = PIO mode (which is wrong).
To Fix it you need to uninstall the driver. Do this by closing the properties and Right Clicking “Primary IDE Channel” and select Uninstall. Do this for all of them if there is more than one. It will ask for a system restart. When you log back in you will notice various “Found New Hardware” slugs come up—for DVD/CD Drive, Hard Drive and the IDE channel itself. It will then ask for another reboot. This time if you go through the check again the Content Transfer Mode should be “Ultra DMA Mode 5” (or perhaps other numbers) and it should all be wonderful again.
Webmaster
Ah Windows! Now that brings back memories … If I’d been in your shoes I’d have instinctively blamed the connecting leads. It was this kind of nonsense that drove me over the edge with Mr Gates’ programming venture. For me, the last piece in the post-Microsoft jigsaw was to use GRAMPS for my Genealogy filing. It runs great on Ubuntu (but is proving a bear to compile on the Mac) – my ultimate aim is to run identical software on both desktop (Ubuntu) and work (Mac) machines. This works fine for OpenOffice and GnuCash, and hopefully will be so for GRAMPS one day.
I must admit, this does take the biscuit for a supposedly user friendly operating system. Making changes behind the scenes with no sensible possibility of reverting is a bit much. I assure you that I will never be upgrading to Vista so when XP runs out I will have no choice but a *nix flavour. Perhaps I should start now to identify alternative packages for all the software I use.