Audacity causes stream to break whilst scrolling browser

[benaround]

Hello
I use Audacity to record programs from the internet, usually the BBC iPlayer, but when I use my laptop or my partner's pc I notice that certain pc activity, for example scrolling around the web page, while I am recording causes the online broadcast to pause momentarily with a resulting gap in the signal I am recording. These gaps are between .01 and .05 seconds and I may get several and I have to go over the work to find them and edit them out. They are just long enough to cause an audible break in the sound. It sounds like something to do with resources as I don't get the problem on my own dual core processor pc but I do get it on my partners pc , which is single core 2.79 G and 1.5 MB RAM, as well as the laptop.
I have just noticed that I get these breaks in the online transmission while scrolling the web page, or a page on another tab, even when Audacity is not recording anything, it just has to be open. It happens with Firefox and IE.

Have searched the Windows forum for "scroll" and only found this:

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... roll#p4441

Does anyone have any ideas? I consider myself a safe surfer and wonder whether to try an old version of the browser.
I have already gone down to Firefox 3.0.11 but cannot tell if there is any improvement, I wonder if there is a way I can give Audacity a priority for resources?

[kozikowski]

There's no shortage of hints and tricks for speeding up your Windows machine. If you have a million items on your desktop, Windows has to keep track of them all and everything slows down. Error Check and Defragment your hard drive. Audacity will not work into a badly fragmented drive and any drive over 90% full will slow the system down, much worse if it's fragmented.

Windows has a nasty habit of collecting trash. Control-Alt-Delete will give you a list of running programs and services. If that list goes over about a page and a half, you should probably erase the hard drive and start with a fresh Windows. You might find services running that you haven't used in years -- all take up space and all slow things down.

Live, real-time audio and video kills marginal machines. It doesn't matter how long it takes Excel to calculate a spreadsheet, you can go for coffee while it's doing it, but if the machine isn't available to process that piano note, it gets lost because the next note is coming right along, right now.

Koz

[benaround]

Thank you for this general advice, I should point out that I have been using Audacity for three years on another computer with no problems, and on the laptop I still currently use for a year before that, and while I appreciate that regular pc maintenance is important especially for trouble free work with sound files, I have never had this particular problem no matter how overdue my normal maintenance is and I am puzzled by its appearance and gradual worsening over the last year. The problem is almost certainly connected with the startling increase in cpu usage caused simply by scrolling a browser page. On my dual core cpu machine this increase is to about 30 or 40 % but on the other desktop and laptop with single core cpu's, albeit 2.79G on the desktop, the increase on scrolling is to 70-100%. Significantly though, It is only when Audacity is running that this increase results in a pause in the stream, either with the BBC iPlayer or other sites which use Real Player.

[steve]

It may be worth checking if there are any updated drivers for your Video card.