broadband and PC slowing each other down

[Steve]

OK, I have Vista on a PC running a dual core 2.13GHz.

I have an 8 megabit connection. I can download a song from itunes at solid 890KBps. Which I equate to be about 8 megabit.

Anyway, today I clicked to download an album in itunes which contained 50 songs.

Itunes downloads in banks of 3 songs at a time. After this it "processes" them. During this processing, the two cores jump to 100% activity and the PC runs very very slow for about 2 minutes at a time, and it also slows down the next bank of songs downloading to about 300KBps.

Is there anything I can do to stop this? Maybe I would be best asking in an itunes forum, but thought I'd try here to see if windows might have anything to do with it.

 

[dave.m]

Steve,
There are limits to what a domestic PC can do at any given moment.

How much RAM do you have?
Have a look in Task manager to see what else is using memory when you are downloading and processing. See if a lot of things can be terminated.

I hope you are not doing all this music downloading to play over the speakers in the Coop and annoy your customers.

dave

 

[Steve]

I hope you are not doing all this music downloading to play over the speakers in the Coop and annoy your customers.

No, but we do have a public music playing etc license, it might make the staff work a bit quicker too, a bit of dance/rave

2GB of RAM. I built the PC myself

 

[dave.m]

Steve,
did you look in Task manager and see if there is a load of nonessential stuff running when you download the music?

dave

 

[Podgkin]

Have you updated the itunes software? May help...
It really is that rubbish!

You can use other software - I think 'floola' is one...if it's to use with your ipod thingy.
If you google your problem there are many others with this.
A suggestion I've seen before is to delete 'Bonjour' (can't test this as I don't have a 'control'-pod) and try switching off 'Aero' in Vista.

Would you let us know?

 

[zorlac]

You could try causing Itunes to only use one core, rather than two.

Just fire up Task Manager right click on the "Itunes.exe" then click on "Set affinity" and disable one core. This will stop Itunes from using both cores, it may take longer to process the songs but at least you'll be able to use your PC in the meantime.

Also in the same menu check that the priority isn't turned up to realtime or high. This can cause loads of problems. And Itunes really shouldn't be using that many resources.

Another possibilty is Smart playlists and the "Genius" thingy. If they are turned on then it will have to process the tunes and find matches every time you add a song. Try turning them off then just run them once a week to keep them up to date.

 

[dave.m]

Steve,
If you are still monitoring this thread:

I have an 8 megabit connection. I can download a song from itunes at solid 890KBps. Which I equate to be about 8 megabit.

Sorry to have to point out that you maths are way out:

890KBps = 0.869140625 MBps

dave

 

[zorlac]

Steve,
If you are still monitoring this thread:

I have an 8 megabit connection. I can download a song from itunes at solid 890KBps. Which I equate to be about 8 megabit.

Sorry to have to point out that you maths are way out:

890KBps = 0.869140625 MBps

dave

Your getting MB and Mb mixed up.

MB = Megabytes commonly used to measure data storage and fast memory.
Mb = Megabit commonly used to measure network speed.

He does say he has an 8 Megabit connection.

Same as when we all had 57.6Kb (Kilobit) modems that had a max speed of 7.2KB (Kilobytes) or there abouts. It was done to confuse people into thinking they were faster than they are.

1 Byte = 8 bits.
1 Megabyte = 8 Megabits.
890KBps = 0.869140625 MBps which is correct, but not for Megabits

 

[empip]

More on sizing ...

Western Digital... caught a minor cold...
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/189602434;jsessionid=4TQVMWJQXVXO0QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN

As did Seagate...
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39290393,00.htm

Don't know about the following... But there 'tis.

...similar cases involving the definition of a gigabyte. In 2003, Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba were sued over hard-disk sizes by a group of users. That case has not yet been resolved.

A suit against Amazon.com over the capacity of an MP3 player bought on the site was also filed in 2003, but was dismissed in 2005.

All the major flash memory card makers, including SanDisk and Kingston, were sued in 2004, but there has been no result in that case yet...

Either way 890 MBytes/sec is near enough 7Mbits/sec ...