Hello. I've Vista Ultimate x32 installed on AMD Athlon x64 3000 / 1gb ram / sata 2 hdd / some Asus mobo and Sound Blaster X-Fi with newest drivers installed. My problem is that when i simply without doing any changes to system run WinAmp and play music in it my processor usage for just this simple tasks goes up to 40-50% (counting audiodg.exe and winamp process). If that wouldn't be enough when i start playing with windows aka trying to access directories on hdd, switching between other windows (doing usual work, not even starting other programs!!) music stops for 1second or causing little noticable interrupts. I have read about AudioDg.exe being the protective drm crap and causing some problems. I am aware that my PC isn't something great but i'm not gonna upgrade computer knowing that it will behave similar even with 2gb ram or dual core.

Question is if this is just Sound blaster bad drivers, bad vista audiodg.exe process that or maybe realy my computer isn't "suitable" enough for this simple task .. playing music.

hope somebody can share his experience on this

What x-fi do you have and what driver version?

Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum - SBXF_PCDVT_LB_2_13_0012.exe with date 10.3.2007. However i see that there is driver with same name that was released 15.03.2007. So downloading it now and will check it out but it would be weird to use exactly same numbers.

Edit:

Same problem when installed the ones from 15.03.2007. Actually those were the same drivers but turns out they were diffrently dated.

I have an audigy 2 zs and it works fine but I'm getting an x-fi xtremegamer in a couple days.

I don't know if it's your problem but you really need 2gb ram minimum to run vista.

i would still point to flakey drivers, his issue isn't with Memory being low but with CPU usage spiking,
Madboy,

have you checked on the creative forums yet? i remeber there being a huge there about how terrible the XFi drivers were. not sure if anything has changed since then or not

@fizban2 - i didn't checked anything yet on forum, i've assumed that when new drivers are rlsed few days ago it would be the working ones since i read about XFi problems ages/months ago.

@dale5605 - i will buy 2gb ram, dual core and best graphics card there is if i will know it will be usefull for anything else then just simple system and to get Winamp running. If i can't have Vista running with just Winamp open and i can't then go thru dirs on hdd because it's causing problems with playing music then something is wrong. If i have to buy new hw and see that the system takes 30% and rest is for games or anything else it's preety bad. My hardware setup ain't that bad yet, i installed Vista to test few things and i am dissapointed for now. I don't even want to mention that when i play music and i start Media Center in ultimate vista then the music is hardly playing anymore. I am realy afraid to even start games with my current setup on Vista even thou on WinXP they were working quite nice and i could play newest F.E.A.R without problems.