Hi I am a duel booter, WinXP / RedHat Linux. My systems specs are as follows: 768MB of DDR(3100 I think), Celeron 2.6Ghz.

I am currently backing up my linux files to CD using Nero, (I access my linux partitions while in Windows). This is so that I can freshly install linux all over again. I am probably going to use a different distro this time just so learn more about linux its self.

My question has to do w/ a problem I have. When I'm in windows, everything seems to run very smoothly for instance if I am playing a .wav file in any program and I decide to start another program, or open a new window I notice nothing unusual about my play back. In linux, the same sound file, played through rezound, and the play cmd, will make brief pauses as the new process is loading.

Also in linux if I am recording audio and I have to many things open (or did earlier, but haven't restarted) it briefly pauses during the recording and when I play the sound file back and it skips at points where it paused during the recording process. Again in windows I have never had this problem.

At first glance I would think it has to do w/ memory and me having a Celeron... this may fix my problem... but why does only linux do it? I have always heard linux is 'better' when it comes to managing things like cpu cycles and memory, before I re-install again, for the nth time, are there any settings / distro suggestions to possibly eliminate or atleast reduce this problem?

thanks

I run Slack 10 w/ 256 megs of DDR2100 RAM and a 2ghz Athlon XP processor, and am a recording artist myself. While I don't usually do recording in Linux, I did record about 30 monologues for a show using Audacity (good, but unstable). No problems. I listen to music all the time through XMMS while doing about 50 other things (surfing, compiling software, chatting on aMSN, working in OOo, whatever). Runs smooth as silk.

Maybe run redhat-config-services and turn off the services you know you don't need.

RedHat is notoriously slow..
sometimes it has to do with a bloated kernel configuration..
so with recompiling kernel and turning off uneeded services you can make it better
but it will never run fast like leaner older type distributions slack, debian
compiled distributions customized for your machine are fastest than slack and debian
gentoo -- sorcerror --
linux from scratch is the fastest hands down bar none because it's simple and there are no bugs....
my highly tweeked lfs is much faser than windows and able to do lots more stuff at once without bogging down (i too am working musician -- small world)
i have to admit i still use windows for recording ..............
what a cop out.

I don't currently have any installable distro's aside from gentoo. I don't want to try gentoo yet because I'd like to study the installation process first... The rest of my other distro's are liveCD distro's I get from Linux Format Mag (good rag)... so I'm going to install Redhat w/ nothing on it and then install things on top of it after the fact...

thx for the nfo tho, I'll be checking out slack or debian next chance I get.

Debian is pretty kickarse if you can install it. I've had issues getting it set up on certain machines. I am still a slacker though, and have never had a machine I couldn't get it running on (within reason ).

i'd love to try slackware myself..i just don't know how to get it up and running on a SATA machine..never makes it past any initial install screens...guess i'm stuck with debian (not that that's a bad thing )

Wonder if your harddrive supports and you are using DMA. I had a lot of problems like that without DMA turned on. They were a bit more severe, though, but then again, I had less than half the system specs you do, so, maybe you are not seeing the effects as severely. (I do think it's strange it it's turned off, because Red Hat should have set it up for you)

Open a terminal and become root:

Then, check to see if DMA is enabled: (where xxx is your hard drive, probably hda, but could be sda, hdb, sdb)

What does it say?