Putting my son's Christmas machine together today and I ran into a couple interesting problems, both sound related.
First, testing an audio CD in the CDRW and DVD in both cases it would start up and play OK, but if I paused or switched tracks it would go into super-slowmotion mode - sounding like a 78rpm record being played at 33rpm. I fixed that by downloading and installing the latest nForce2 400 chipset drivers.
Worse though, is the static I get playing back a CD or DVD. I've watched the HDD activity light, and the static bursts occur whenever there is harddrive activity. I think the way playback occurs is that the data is read from the source into a buffer on the harddrive, and the audio/video app plays it off the hardrive (I think). Anyway, with the harddrive constantly being updated there is static/scratchy sounds all the way through the music/movie.
I made sure the harddrive and CD/DVD drives are on separate power taps to the supply, but that didn't help. Could it be a problem that its a cheap power suppy (350W)? The case and power supply were $30 together. Or is there some setting in Win2K I can adjust that would help?
Also, its hard locked a couple times just playing Age of Empires.
Any tests I can use to see if its a PS problem?
Thanks help!
PS: specs are ASUS A7N8X-X mobo, AthlonXP 2500, 512Mb Kingston, 40Gb Seagate Barracuda (pulled this from his old machine), Radeon 9600 Pro, Win2K.
EDIT: Found the problem! Didn't have DMA enabled for the 2nd IDE channel. Still have been experiencing occasional hard lockups though.
