G
Guest
Hi,
I've recently run into a problem playing music stored on a hard drive which
is turning out to have a very convoluted way of winding itself to the very
guts of my operating system.
I'm running Windows XP Professional SP2 and recently I decided to purchase
an external hard drive to store music on. After an initial error caused by a
faulty USB 2.0 PCI card, I managed to get the drive up and working. I
transferred all of my music onto it and I was excited to try it out. I played
one of the MP3's and about 30 seconds into the song I heard a jarring jitter,
reminiscent of a skip on an old walkman. These errors continued popping up at
random intervals in every single song that I tried to play.
Since I had never experienced this while the MP3's were stored on an
internal hard drive, I immediately thought that the error must be caused by
the fact that the USB 2.0 port could not keep up with the very high bitrate
of the media. Momentarily disillusioned with my purchase I thought that I
would have to revert back to storing the files back on an internal drive.
However, just to completely convince myself I decided to take a look at Task
Manager while playing a song with Windows Media Player. Interestingly enough
every time the jitter occured a spike showed up in the CPU usage of one of
the svchost.exe processes. So I proceeded to End Task it and sure enough the
jitter dissapeared when playing the exact same songs where it appeard before.
After ending this particular svchost.exe process, I observed that Windows
restarts it. The system remains at status quo for 30 seconds then all of a
sudden the Windows XP theme dissapears, and then restarts. Because of this
symptom I investigated the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services,
table and saw that the Themes service was part of the "svchost.exe -netsvcs"
executable.
So after a bit of detective work, I think that the solution to this very
annoying problem lies in restarting one of the services which "svchost.exe
-netsvcs" is responsible for running. I wonder if anyone else has had this
problem and if there is a known solution out there?
I've recently run into a problem playing music stored on a hard drive which
is turning out to have a very convoluted way of winding itself to the very
guts of my operating system.
I'm running Windows XP Professional SP2 and recently I decided to purchase
an external hard drive to store music on. After an initial error caused by a
faulty USB 2.0 PCI card, I managed to get the drive up and working. I
transferred all of my music onto it and I was excited to try it out. I played
one of the MP3's and about 30 seconds into the song I heard a jarring jitter,
reminiscent of a skip on an old walkman. These errors continued popping up at
random intervals in every single song that I tried to play.
Since I had never experienced this while the MP3's were stored on an
internal hard drive, I immediately thought that the error must be caused by
the fact that the USB 2.0 port could not keep up with the very high bitrate
of the media. Momentarily disillusioned with my purchase I thought that I
would have to revert back to storing the files back on an internal drive.
However, just to completely convince myself I decided to take a look at Task
Manager while playing a song with Windows Media Player. Interestingly enough
every time the jitter occured a spike showed up in the CPU usage of one of
the svchost.exe processes. So I proceeded to End Task it and sure enough the
jitter dissapeared when playing the exact same songs where it appeard before.
After ending this particular svchost.exe process, I observed that Windows
restarts it. The system remains at status quo for 30 seconds then all of a
sudden the Windows XP theme dissapears, and then restarts. Because of this
symptom I investigated the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services,
table and saw that the Themes service was part of the "svchost.exe -netsvcs"
executable.
So after a bit of detective work, I think that the solution to this very
annoying problem lies in restarting one of the services which "svchost.exe
-netsvcs" is responsible for running. I wonder if anyone else has had this
problem and if there is a known solution out there?