I thought I'd share a few of the tools that I've used to get my computer to respond the best for when playing audio. It all seems to help... so why not take the time and see how your computer is doing and if you're unable to set your buffers on the devices to minimum... these should help!
First thing I use is DPC Latency Monitor.
It's very easy to use, download it, place it wherever you want to run it (just a .exe file) and watch the latency. Anything that stays in the green is good. The lower in the green the better of course, but you should be able to run this program the whole time will playing a track and it should never jump above 500... infact when playing mine hovers around 150 - 300. That's on a Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz with 8GB of ram.
If you get some blips above 500 and want to figure out what is possible doing it then you need to grab LatencyMon.
When you run this program, click on the Drivers button and then click the green arrow. After a few seconds it'll start recording what's taking the processors time. Let it run for about a minute or so to get a good idea what's taking the processors time. My guess is if you have anything that's taking even close to 1ms of time, that's you problem. Here's a shot of my computer to give you an idea. You'll see that my TCP/IP is taking the most time as it's streaming the music. So that make sense.
If I turn on my battery to charge it (well show the icon as well) it'll cause massive latency. So I've disabled the "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery." Fixed it right up. Now of course if I pull the plug and use the battery, I then have no idea when the battery will die and it will run it completely out. So you have to be careful with that one. Another one is the NIC drivers will often cause problems, so make sure you have the latest drivers installed.
One of the greatest helps is to edit your power options and set windows to High Performance over Balanced. When you do this a LOT of the latency issues go away. So I'd start here first (even though I put it at the end).
First thing I use is DPC Latency Monitor.
It's very easy to use, download it, place it wherever you want to run it (just a .exe file) and watch the latency. Anything that stays in the green is good. The lower in the green the better of course, but you should be able to run this program the whole time will playing a track and it should never jump above 500... infact when playing mine hovers around 150 - 300. That's on a Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz with 8GB of ram.
If you get some blips above 500 and want to figure out what is possible doing it then you need to grab LatencyMon.
When you run this program, click on the Drivers button and then click the green arrow. After a few seconds it'll start recording what's taking the processors time. Let it run for about a minute or so to get a good idea what's taking the processors time. My guess is if you have anything that's taking even close to 1ms of time, that's you problem. Here's a shot of my computer to give you an idea. You'll see that my TCP/IP is taking the most time as it's streaming the music. So that make sense.
If I turn on my battery to charge it (well show the icon as well) it'll cause massive latency. So I've disabled the "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery." Fixed it right up. Now of course if I pull the plug and use the battery, I then have no idea when the battery will die and it will run it completely out. So you have to be careful with that one. Another one is the NIC drivers will often cause problems, so make sure you have the latest drivers installed.
One of the greatest helps is to edit your power options and set windows to High Performance over Balanced. When you do this a LOT of the latency issues go away. So I'd start here first (even though I put it at the end).
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