Ph4ZeD said:
Hi everyone. I play Warcraft III, a online strategy game through
Battle.net,
and I often used MSN audio conversations while playing the game to help
coordinate with my allies. The MSN audio conversations were always the
best
as there was little delay, excellent quality and did not produce extra lag
(I
have 568/256 anyway). So when I downloaded and installed SP2, I quickly
noticed that using a microphone for an audio conversation through MSN
produced unplayable lag when connected to Battle.net. All the relevant
ports
were open and I had set the relevant permissions for the programs
involved.
Using the command prompt to ping europe.battle.net quickly confirmed it:-
without an audio conversation my ping was steady at 48. With it, my ping
ranged from 200+, making it completely unplayable. I like the pop-up
blocking
and enhanced firewall, but its not worth it, so i uninstalled SP2 - and
pronto, when using an audio conversation, I have a ping of 50 again to
europe.battle.net. Microsoft are so quick to peddle all the reasons to
download SP2, but when its so bug-ridden, a fancy pop-up blocker is hardly
swaying me back.
Your situation shows up on a few machines. The solution that worked
so far is to completely uninstall Qos packet scheduler which you can
find under Properties for your Lan or high speed connection.
The problem may have shown up on your machine after SP2. But this
problem with audio and MSN Messenger has been fixed by removing
Qos before SP2 was produced. Most machines do not have to remove
Qos so the problem cause is subtle. Removing Qos has no apparent
consequence for non-commercial environments.
Slim complained about this situation in: Audio Chat is killing my bandwidth
which is in the microsoft.public.msn.messenger newsgroup and can be
found in groups.google.com Slim blamed it on SP2, then he posted
Solution to audio problems with SP2
"I've posted a few times in the past month that I was having bandwidth
problems while doing audio chat after the SP2 upgrade. I few others have
mentioned the same thing, it appears that the problems occur with people who
have dsl using PPPOE connection.
The solution is to completly uninstall QOS. By simply not checking the QOS
box in the adapter properties is not enough, it needs to be uninstalled.
After uninstalling it, everything is back to normal (pre SP2)."
There is a bug involved but it is in the code prior to SP2, and in xp or
Messenger?
Or not, because there is no such thing as universal code that works with all
the
manufactured chipsets and their various combinations, nor all the
manufactured
software and their drivers. It is up to the manufacturers to rewrite their
software
code. There are at least a 100,000 copyrighted applications out there. Can
you
imagine MS trying to obtain rights to see that proprietary code and then
trying
write code that works with all those apps in various combinations? This
situation
is way to complex to produce a universal rule/algorithm --> expressed as OS
software in order to accomodate all the scenarios and can not be done by
computer
(or human(s)). This info ties into AI:
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~case/colt.html
John Case's COLT Page
"Computational Learning Theory (COLT) is a branch of theoretical computer
science which mathematically studies the power of computer programs to learn
(algorithmic) rules for predicting things such as membership in a concept
or, as in the first example above, rules for how to generate a sequence.
Consider the problem of finding a rule for generating a sequence of numbers
such as 9, 61, 52, 63, 94, 46, 18, 1, 121, 441, ... . Here is a rule for
this sequence. First compute the squares of successive integers beginning
with 3, but, then, to generate the sequence, use, in place of these squares,
the squares each with its decimal digits written down in reverse order
(ignoring any lead zeros). N.B. This rule can be written as a formal
algorithm (or computer program). The problem of finding such rules gets
harder as the sequences to generate get more complicated than the one above.
Can the rule finding itself be done by some computer program? Interestingly,
it is mathematically proven that there can be no computer program which can
eventually find (synonym: learn) these (algorithmic) rules for all sequences
which have such rules!"
SH: I don't mean you should go back to SP2. Microsoft warned that some apps
and quite a few games wouldn't work with SP2. I do mean that this is best
Service Pack that Microsoft has ever produced for over 90% of Windows users
who have no issues. They like the pop-up blocker, Windows Firewall which
automatically sees MSN Messenger 6.2 for instance, and if they have a home
network, they can now connect to the internet on all the computers, an
option not available before with ICF. Probably unaware if security
enhancements help or not.
Since there is no such thing as a perfect OS, a bug is something which gives
most users a problem. The makers of Warcraft III had months to test SP2 and
warn users that SP2 had audio problems with Messenger or create a patch.
Even now there would be lots of other posts with the same complaint as
yours. When there are just a few complaints, that doesn't qualify as a
"bug-ridden" SP2, but rare instances and combinations of chipsets and
drivers on your particular machine and a few others. There are such
instances which are in principle, unpredictable, and no universal cure.
I hope you find the COLT link interesting, Stephen
