I rarely use the visual end of WMP, however, when I have, I have noticed a
slight difference in the CPU usage, not 38% however. But then again, I am
using a dual core processor, and rarely see the difference.
Part of this may be that when you are using the visuals, it causes the
program to be a foreground program, rather than a background program. If you
are running it without visuals, or in a minimized state, it runs as a
background program. Funny how windows does that.
And in Vista 64, the architecture is different, the media player uses
roughly half the resources because of the increased efficiency of the
system. (Which most 64 bit users will openly tell you that XP64 and Vista 64
do run more efficiently.
That being said, if you don't like the system draw, and you are not all
about the visual effects, you can use the sidebar gadget for audio, which is
what I do with either the "Abum Art" gadget, the "Media Dock" gadget, or the
"Media Player Shuffle" gadget. they use less resources and always run as a
background program.
Hope this helps
