The computer I've been trying to fix has some odd sound issues. It has a DVD Rom and a separate CD Rom drive. Say for example, I play an audio CD from the CD Drive... sounds fine. If I put the same audio CD in the DVD Drive, the sound almost sounds like it's popping at times. Movies do the same thing. At first I thought it could be the drive, but after booting up a copy of Knoppix, anything played from the DVD Drive worked fine. Windows not being my main OS, what could this problem be? What system or drive setting is messed up? Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks Brandon
This sound like your drive is not set to use UDMA. There are two places to enable UDMA. In the BIOS, depending on your BIOS make and version and in your Device manager (Control Panel --> System --> Hardware). When you open the device manager, you should see an item called IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers. If you expand it you should have at least two IDE channels. Right click on either and go to properties and then go to the Advanced Settings tab. there change the 'Transfer mode' settings to 'DMA if available'. Repeat this for the second channel. If the settings keep reverting to PIO, then your BIOS need to be reconfigure.
The cd drive (I guarantee you) has an analog sound cable running from the the drive to the soundcard (or mobo). [ The following is (mostly ) unbiased and totally true ] The way windows works, sound from drives with analog cables is perfect. Sound from drives without the cables, which has to be piped through the ide cable again digitally, comes out choppy due to various windoze inefficiencies. Linux, being a much better operating system , efficiently grabs the audio to give you a pleasant listening experience. [ end unbiasedness ] Windoze sucks poly-p man
Thank you both for your responses. Indeed DMA was the problem. The computer I was working on had been "rescued" using a System restore CD in the past couple months and that is when the problem started. I had to do some playing around because it kept reverting away from DMA for some reason... but doing some Google hunting I found some registry fixes that I had to apply. Thanks.