With Microsoft’s recent launch of Windows Server 2008, there seems to be some buzz about using it as a workstation OS. There was a recent post on OS news linking to Using Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS (by Vijayshinva Karnure, apparently a MS employee). Not many days after the post on OS news, at work we got our MSDN subscription activation codes.
How could I resist?
I followed all of the steps on Karnure’s blog and so far I’ve only had one really nagging issue: stuttering audio. Initially I discovered that disabling Aero made the stuttering (mostly) go away.
I mentioned the issue and my solution to Random. Well, he came up with a great solution (as he always does, given rand() and enough time). He found this MSDN article about the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service. It discusses the registry keys that control the multimedia experience of your system.
I checked the following key in my registry:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
The value for “SystemResponsiveness” was set to 100, which means 100% of all other processes on my machine were given higher priority than multimedia. I fired up my Vista box and discovered that value was set to 20%. Aha!
Changing that “SystemResponsiveness” value from 100 to 20 did the trick. Now I’m coding away merrily with nary a skip in my music. Thank you, Random Boy!
Mr. ANSI Pants
thank you very much! i’m running server 2008 under virtualbox, and suspected the virtualization as source of the problem.
This did not fix my audio on server 2008. Changed my system responsiveness to 20% and audio still sucks real bad!!