Here is a piece of pc madness.... 
Since I upgraded my pc I was facing a very cryptic problem: my pc froze at random times (or so it seemed) when noone was using it. The sound would loop forever with a horrendous sound and all usb devices would power down. The only solution was a power cycle.
Windows logs revealed nothing at all (no real surprise there) and using torture programs to see if the problem could be reproduced just failed: the pc was working fine
No overheating, no bad ram, no psu shortage. (using a gigabyte mobo, a gigabyte vga, an i5-2500 cpu, corsair ram, a x-fi card and a coolermaster psu , all mid-range prized components ) I could play for hours heavy games or benchmarks and it would never freeze. I even went the extra mile to actually remove my X-Fi platinum card and use onboard audio 
... did not help :dry:
So after a friend hinted me to look at the software side of things I started looking at windows services, power options, Kaspersky settings, scheduler tasks... needless to say nothing suspicious was found...
and then it struck me: WHAT was running when those freezes occurred?
the answer (as you might have guessed it already) was: WINAMP .
All the time those freezes happened WinAmp was streaming from rockradio1.com (a little bit of advertisement here, this station rocks and has no ads or crap) that I enjoy listening in the background when I am doing stuff or sleeping
At first it was a little hard to believe that after ~13 years or so of using winamp it was to blame (latest version too)... Well it appears that since I stopped using it there are no more freezes!
And what I used to replace it? (prepare for some more advertisement here)
XMPlay http://www.un4seen.com
A freeware ULTRA light-weight player that requires no installation, has a ton of plugins , has a specialty on amiga mod files and consumes 4-7MB of ram (as I have noticed in the past days that I use it) .
No more freezes, no more streaming bugs (for example winamp used to just stop forever if the stream was interrupted, xmplay resumes after 2-3 secs automatically)
I still have no idea what winamp did to freeze a win7pro/x64 system but I am not really that curious to discover since it made me use XMPlay...
So if you wanna try a nice little player or have some kind of prob with winamp be sure to give XMPlay a shot!
Since I upgraded my pc I was facing a very cryptic problem: my pc froze at random times (or so it seemed) when noone was using it. The sound would loop forever with a horrendous sound and all usb devices would power down. The only solution was a power cycle.
Windows logs revealed nothing at all (no real surprise there) and using torture programs to see if the problem could be reproduced just failed: the pc was working fine
No overheating, no bad ram, no psu shortage. (using a gigabyte mobo, a gigabyte vga, an i5-2500 cpu, corsair ram, a x-fi card and a coolermaster psu , all mid-range prized components
) I could play for hours heavy games or benchmarks and it would never freeze. I even went the extra mile to actually remove my X-Fi platinum card and use onboard audio ... did not help :dry:So after a friend hinted me to look at the software side of things I started looking at windows services, power options, Kaspersky settings, scheduler tasks... needless to say nothing suspicious was found...
and then it struck me: WHAT was running when those freezes occurred?
the answer (as you might have guessed it already) was: WINAMP .
All the time those freezes happened WinAmp was streaming from rockradio1.com (a little bit of advertisement here, this station rocks and has no ads or crap) that I enjoy listening in the background when I am doing stuff or sleeping
At first it was a little hard to believe that after ~13 years or so of using winamp it was to blame (latest version too)... Well it appears that since I stopped using it there are no more freezes!
And what I used to replace it? (prepare for some more advertisement here)
A freeware ULTRA light-weight player that requires no installation, has a ton of plugins , has a specialty on amiga mod files and consumes 4-7MB of ram (as I have noticed in the past days that I use it) .
No more freezes, no more streaming bugs (for example winamp used to just stop forever if the stream was interrupted, xmplay resumes after 2-3 secs automatically)
I still have no idea what winamp did to freeze a win7pro/x64 system but I am not really that curious to discover since it made me use XMPlay...
So if you wanna try a nice little player or have some kind of prob with winamp be sure to give XMPlay a shot!
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been using it a long time now
