[Scgeeks] Re: RESOLVED Re: RAM voltages

[Twayne]

...
> I've had the standalone shareware version SIW for a long time on my
> various machines, lots of great info available. SiSandra is another
> good one. Both have limitations on some of their apps unless you pay
> up, but for what I want to look at they work fine.

That's one of the bennies of groups; new stuff<g>!  Looked at SiSandra 
but don't see a state-side source yet, but I didn't look real hard. 
More interested in what it was.  Might be worth a trial download; 
thanks.

>
>
>> _Aside:_  Just for grins, since the BIOS allowed it, I tried
>> increasing the FSB speed to the next setting to see what happened. 
>> What happened was, I had to look for the BIOS erase jumper to get
>> booted again!<G>  It wasn't labeled, either; had to guess by its
>> location on the mobo. Then I noticed the label: It's UNDER the
>> header base!  Duhhh!
>
> Double Doh! You got _really_ lucky there, you know that, right?

Nah, long's it's something you do with power off, like CMOS resets are, 
it's not a big problem.  I did get lucky that way though, you're right, 
in grabbing the right one.  I was more worried it'd turn out to be one 
of those "short this to that" things without a jumper to work with. 
These old fingers ain't too steady no more<g>.

>
>>
>> It's been an "interesting" exercise if nothing else.  I've got it
>> fully rebuilt now and it's actually not too bad.  Pauses from
>> anything that causes a massive prefetch reorg are a little annoying,
>> but all are less than 10 seconds at least,
>
> Do you know what apps cause the "prefetch" slowdown? I know absolutely
> nothing about prefetching, guess it's time to gargle it. I
> occasionally have "stuttering" sound card issue, sometimes when CPU
> usage is high, sometimes not, so I know it's something else causing
> the problem. In another thread, I said that I've fixed all of my
> soundcard issues except for that one. I discovered that the
> irritating crackling noise while listening to streaming XM audio was
> not being caused by my PC, because I heard the same damn crackling
> noise emanating from my XM car stereo while driving today! Must be
> sun spots or sumpthin.....

Well, basically, that would be any situation that makes the computer 
discover that it doesn't have a bunch of stuff already in prefetch that 
it needs and it has to pull some stuff in off the disk to use, and of 
course, throw out some prefetches already there to make room for it. 
I'm making this up, but say I was running a video intensive (math stuff) 
set of apps and suddenly switched to something that used a huge database 
(arrays and string manipulations).  If the prefetch was full of math 
oriented graphics "stuff", it'd have to repopulate it for the new tasks 
that were requested.  Prefetch is sort of a "look ahead" or "predictive" 
buffer of stuff you "might" use next.  I ain't no expert<g>.

It would be normal for stuttering to occur when cpu usage was near being 
maxxed out, BTW.  More RAM, faster hard drive, whatever; somehow the cpu 
needs to have time to process everything.

However, I doubt very much that prefetch would be the cause of 
stuttering or static with sound applications.  Prefetch probably isn't 
much involved in that process once it's been initiated.  Besides, you 
say it's apparently not anything the PC is doing because you hear it in 
other outputs (car, etc).  That would indicate some sort of radio wave 
(electro-magnetic interference).  That could be caused by all kinds of 
things ranging from an electric fence or protection device of some sort 
to neighborhood equipment to power grid transmissions to gosh knows 
what.
   A few years ago I had a problem like that which turned out to be my 
neighbor's electric fence for their sheep.  It was being picked up in my 
computer speakers as a series of pops once a second, and was even 
audible on my analog phone lines.  And finding the source of it turned 
out to be the easy part; it didn't bother HIS computer or phone line, so 
he wasn't too anxious to do anything about it!  It was actually the 
phone company that tracked it down for me because I reported the "pops" 
as a problem on my phones.
  I actually had to go over to his farm and help him troubleshoot his 
ground system to get rid of it.  At one time he had a neutral problem 
between the house and the barn, so every time he did anything with his 
electrical, he'd drive in a new ground rod; he had ground loops with 
ground loops in them!!  Took a couple weeks to get it down to two rods, 
one at the house and one at the barn, and then get his electric fence 
connected to the right one.  You should see the spaghetti he has for 
wiring<.g>!

I guess the first thing I'd do if it were me, is prove that what you 
hear in the car is actually what you hear in the computer speakers, if I 
understand you correctly.  Somehow, you have to be able to hear both of 
them at the same time to prove that they're synchronized or at least 
nearly so.  If not, there could be multiple, unlrelated problems.
   I have something like that going on right now too, in fact.  Seems 
like a random static noise in the speakers.  Neither the computer Volume 
control, nor the Mixer controls have any affect on it.  But the volume 
knob on the speakers does have an affect on it.  Sometimes it'll be gone 
unless something turns the amps on to put out a sound, other times it'll 
be there whether there's an audio gate on or not.
  Playing music, there's no sign of any static on the waveform, but if I 
try to record, the static is definitely there in the waveform being 
recorded, regardless of the recordging source (CD, mic, TV tuner, 
whatever).  There's no pattern to it or anything I can discover so far. 
It's been bugging me for a couple months now.  I even tried a different 
set of speakers from another machine; no difference.
   Tell ya what:  If you find a solution, let me know and I'll do the 
same for you!  IIRC your setup is a lot more complex than mine though, 
for what that's worth.  The only unusual component I really have is a TV 
tuner (TIVO) but I keep unused input/outputs disabled.  And disabling 
the full audio out doesn't stop it either<g>.
   Have you tried using the Mixer to turn off all the inputs and outputs 
one at a time and as a group?  Probably, I seem to recall this is a long 
time project you've been at.

Cheers,

Twayne