Fracking Vista

Photo: Kristi Evans

My friend Niel recently blew away Vista and installed Ubuntu because of stuttering media issues.  I applauded the move and certainly considered it myself with a long standing wireless problem on my Thinkpad.  A couple days ago, my desktop Vista machine, which has been reasonably solid, started having stuttering during playback.  Pretty much any music or video playback over the web would stutter a bit with any other activity, browser, network copying or even just local disk access with Explorer.

So I turned up Mark Rossinivich’s blog post about Vista’s multimedia playback and network access.  In a nutshell, Microsoft TRIED to improve media playback by adding a service (MMCSS) that increases the priority of the media thread.  OK so far, but MMCSS seems to clobber some network connections.  That I could live with, but it turns out that it’s not altogether bug free and the service itself can cause the media to stutter.  Um, wasn’t that the whole point of the damn service?  This all worked fine on XP, so why does Microsoft go trying to fix stuff that isn’t broken?

One reg hack and one disabled service later (thanks ZDNet) and the problem appears to be resolved.  I’m still uncertain why this issue would suddenly turn up since I don’t allow Windows Update to run automatically and haven’t installed anything recently (…oh wait, I did install Raw Therapee the other day, could it be?…nah).