Sound Problems

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Davis [mailto:ald at dovienya.net]

> Sound quality is fine (good, even) so long as I don't attempt anything
> that causes large parts of the screen to change 
> repeatedly/rapidly under
> X, ie; scrolling, switching between virtual desktops, moving a window.

So you know it's not really the sound system, it's the bloated,
multilayered, inefficient XWindows system that's killing your CPU cycles.

If you run a performance monitor on a Windows machine, you'll see that
moving the mouse runs the CPU up to 100%.  Windows is pretty well optimized,
and it's GUI is pretty efficient.

One of the things you can do is to switch your graphics card.  An AGP card
takes more CPU power than a PCI video card, and the more processing power on
the card, the more it can potentially offload from the CPU - provided an
XWindows driver exists that will allow it.

Other things are to simplify your GUI.  If you're running KDE, try turning
off some of the effects.  Try running under a lighter window manager without
the desktop enhancements, and see if that helps.