Does music slow my laptop down?

Question

I have a brand new Acer 5610z installed with windows vista home premium. I am planning to play my music on either I-tunes or Windows media player

I am more interested on the effect on the drive than the effect on processing speed

Answer 1

It depends on the MP3 player you plan on using.
Windows Media Player does not compress files, they stay huge and take up memory but not much System Resources.
Where as iTunes takes up little memory because it automatically compresses MP3s, yet it takes alot of System Resources.

System resources determine how fast your PC runs, but the good thing is you can replenish your system resources by just rebooting your PC.

That being said I would say you are fine with playing music files on your laptop, I would say use iTunes, that is what I do!

Answer 2

Since you asked about the hard drive specifically, initially no. If you only play your tunes,i.e. you're not on the Internet, playing locally installed games, or anything else. Even when you're on the Internet, your PC will need to access your hard drive to run the browser and what ever else you're working on (email client, messenger, etc.) To get the best speed from your drive, do nothing else but play the media player.

Now, after you've had the laptop for a while, added-removed programs and files, if you don't run a disk scanner and a defragger, your disk drive performance will degrade. And you ***must*** run the disk scanner first. It checks the hard disk for it's equivalent of potholes. It fixes them or puts an electronic flag saying telling the operating system and programs, "Danger Will Robinson, don't use this spot!" Then the defragger rearranges the information on the hard disk so it reads it as efficiently as possible, avoiding the flagged areas. If you run the defragger first, you run the risk of it moving good data to a hard disk pothole. If it's a music file, you've lost just one tune. But if it's an important part of the operating system, you've just hosed your laptop.

But it will never be as fast as when you first got it, because of all the additional programs and files (media esp.) that you've loaded on it.

Compute in Peace!!!

Answer 3

If you have an ancient 486 DX2 66 and a quantum fireball hard disk with 2GB space and windows media player or some other player running with fancy graphics and visualizations then there will be problems.

On modern pcs, i don't think it will matter much as almost everyone has more then 256mb of ram. Just use media player classic, if your music stutters then it means something is not right at all.

Answer 4

Your music player will use some system resources, yes, but the effect should not be noticible.

If you were doing something really demanding (like rendering a video, or compiling a large program, for instance) it would take slightly longer while you had music playing than if you did not, but other than that, there should be no effect.

Answer 5

It depends on a few factors. How much ram do you have? what is your processor speed? how much storage space is your music collection taking up? If you have 256mb of ram, then yes. If your processor speed is like 1ghz, then yes. And if your music collection is 32gb and you have a 40gb hard drive, then yes. It is slowing up your laptop. Otherwise if you have a newer laptop that's at least twice that fast with 1gb of ram and a 120gb hard drive and your music comprising less than 30gb, it's fair to say that the music is not a problem.

Answer 6

i dont think so but why would it slow it down the thing with acer is that some times you might get less than what you pay for what i mean is that there good pcs but arent shipped before shipping if they turn on they work now i hope you have at least 2gigs of memory and a dualcore processor if possible a 256mb video card if not your going to run into vist prblms in at least a year trust me you are gonna be sorry if you dont upgrade good for basic computing though

Answer 7

Well an easy way to check this is play your music and while its playing get into your task manager(ctrl+alt+delete) go to the tab processes and see what CPU % is being used on the program in question. It really shouldn't be that high definetly not more than 10%.

Answer 8

hire your pc's storage as superb you are able to, that is there which you would be able to utilise. while speaking approximately reminiscence slowing issues down, we are refering to the RAM reminiscence, which fills up if numerous classes are open on an analogous time. whether that is not plagued by technique of how many music archives you have stored. Vote if this enables :)

Answer 9

Nah.. as long as u have enuf memory installed then u should be good to go. If anything.. playing dvd movie will takes up more system resources.

Answer 10

No, it shouldn't use too many resources and since you are running vista, your computer should be fully equipped with memory, processor, hard drive, etc already.