playing a cd

It seems that no tech service is being of any help to me. I figured what I really needed was advice from someone that knows what I am talking about.
I have a compaq presario5200 system with Win xp home. Sometimes when I play a cd using RealPlayer the music will stop and the cd drive with increase in rpm's and the music will start again. With Windows Media Player it does the same thing but may not increase rpm's till the end of the track. I have updated all drivers and programs with no luck. Any help would be appreciated!

Gator

 

Gator, It sounds like some other program may be grabbing too much processor capacity and momentarily starving the CD-ROM for attention. How fast is your processor and what other programs are running? Have you tried it after shutting some things down?

That is not to say your CD-ROM drive couldn't be failing though or you that you may need to reinstall MP.

 

probably not

Running a P4 1.8 Mhz and other than usual Win programs, nothing is running that would take up that much. I checked for conflicts just for S&G and nothing there.

 

You certainly have enough system to handle playing a cd. I would suspect the drive as being faulty hardware in that case. Since you indicate the same problem is present on different software I would think the laser isn't reading the disk and finally gets behind the buffer and during the catch up period you experience the drop out of audio. It would probably be worse on older scratched/damaged discs or may affect some new discs more than others.

Do you have problems when copying data from the disk? I would think it would affect that function as well.

Good luck.

 

Seems to be no problem with either installing a new program of copying from my CDROM to CDRW. Aslo, I don't have the problem all the time and not always on the same cd. That is why I thought it was either the drivers or the drive itself. I hate to think that a new CDROM is bugged straight out of the box, it is only a year old.

 

It seems that after a few months and more searching I have found the problem with my cd player. Actually it wasn't with the player itself but rather in the BIOS. I changed the performance to quiet and everything seems to be working great.