Sound Stutters

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Hi, I reformatted a friend’s hard drive and re-installed WINDOWS 98 SE. All went well except when we “play” some of the window-related WAV files, the sound “stutters” – like a real fast dial tone. Only happens with the Window WAV files. I tried to replace the window WAV files with some from another computer but get the same result. Other sounds such as music CD’s and other EXE files work fine.

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Just out of curiosity, what kind of hardware is this running on? Particularly the sound card?

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The sound card is integrated – it is CMEDIA as near as I can tell. Under the DEVICE MGR SOUND listing – there is the following – C-Media Softmidi Driver, DOS Mode MPU-401 Emulator, External MIDI (MPU 401)Device, SB16 Audio Device, Windows Sound System (WSS) Device and Wave Device for Voice Modem.

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Trebor, that being the case you should check the website for the motherboard manufacturer and see if you can obtain the latest C-Media drivers. Better yet, cump30 bucks into a Creative AudioPCI card, which will give you much better sound and eat less CPU time even if the weirdo problem remains. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that it’s due to the onboard sound chip more than anything to do with Windows – I’ve only seen this happen when the CPU was trying to do something and had to spend time dealing with a PCM stream from a WAV file.

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This is a “home made” system by a local guy who buys the cheapest components he can and throws them together. At this point, I “turned off” all the windows sounds and my friend seems to be OK with that. This is a 333 mhz celeron system with 64 mb ram memory (72 pin simm) that is border line whether he should spend any money on it or just get a new system. Where would we buy the $30 sound card? Thanks for you help.

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The BEST listing of the lowest prices on the internet is Pricewatch (http://www.pricewatch.com[/url%5D).

It’s basically a collection of different vendors. I saved a BUNDLE on my recent self-built machine by buying from vendors I found there.

Hope this helps!

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In addition to what Mark suggests, I have built two AMD 1.O+ machines for work for less than $250 each with parts from Outpost.com. For simply running Excel 2000 and Timeclock software, they really beat the heck out of the Emachines celeron 333 we had. Each has onboard video, audio, used PC133 RAM which we already had, used the same CDROM out of the old machine. Basically, ordered the barebones system and the smallest hard drive I could get, and went from there.

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Remember that the benefit to an add-on sound card is that you can take it out whenever you choose and migrate it to the next Frankenstein system.

Nearly any major retailer sells the AudioPCI, which is my choice for a solid low-end sound card. Best Buy, Circuit City, and a few others in my area are the major retailers. You could also check PriceWatch for the same, if shopping locally isn’t an option.

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