CD's chattering

[zeretul1]

I am running xp home on a home network with two other
win98se machines. The other users have noticed that cd
audio plays poorly lately. It skips, chatters, and
otherwise does not play in a continuous stream. This is
from cd in the cd drive. New cd's. I have run a lens
cleaner, but this has not helped. They both have winmedia
9, and it is fully updated. I am also running mcafee
virusscan 7.0 and firewall 4.0. These same cd's play fine
on my machine. I have begun a virus scan, but I don't
believe this is the problem.

One of the machines runs a pII400 with 576mb sdram, the
other with a celeron633 and 256mb sdram.

 

[R. McCarty]

Windows XP has a built-in feature that reduces the default
operating mode of a IDE/ATAPI device after a certain # of
errors have occurred.
Recent CD/DVD's should run at UDMA Mode 2. When
the mode is reduced by Windows it may appear as PIO.

You can check this from Control Panel/System/Advanced/
Device Manager. Expand the ATAPI/IDE controller category.
Then double-click the Primary and look in Advanced. It
should show the Master/Slave and their current operating
mode. Repeat this for the Secondary, as most CD's are
assigned to the Secondary channel. If you locate any PIO
devices, toggle the setting back to "Use DMA if possible."

 

[zeretul1]

Well..uh.. thanks? As I said, it is the win98se machines
that are having this problem. But I'll try oyur
suggestion anyway.