TM
FlexRadio Systems 2003 Page 7
CPU Loading Too High – “Glitches” Heard in the Audio Output
Operational Description: Not all PCs are created equal. The CPU clock rate alone does
not tell the whole story. SDR-1000 performance will be directly affected by bus, video,
sound card, and memory performance. Also, the number of applications running will
affect the performance of the radio.
Probable Causes:
1. The SDRConsole uses increasingly sophisticated DSP software to perform all of
the modulation, demodulation, and filtering tasks. It is recommended that your
system use at least a 600MHz CPU with 256MB or more of RAM and a high
performance graphics subsystem. If you plan to run the VB6 IDE you will need
at least a 1GHZ machine to run in interpreted mode.
2. One of the most likely problems is that you have a slow on-board video system.
These steal CPU and memory cycles to perform graphics tasks. Try adding a high
performance AGP video card such as that used by gamers. In many cases, this
will improve performance more than a higher speed CPU because of the graphics
overhead of the spectral display.
3. USB sound cards may add significant processor overhead as compared to PCI bus
cards. If a USB sound card is required, it may be necessary to upgrade CPU
speed.
4. You may not have enough memory. Try increasing memory to 256MB or even
512MB.
5. Another good idea is to NOT allow Windows to manage the swap file. Set the
minimum and maximum sizes to the same number, which effectively stops
Windows from resizing it on the fly. You can change this under the System
control panel, under Advanced Performance Options. A reasonable value for
Windows 2000 is about 128MB. If possible it should be located on the second
hard drive, if fitted.
6. Remove or turn off performance hogs like high color, animations, fancy screen
backgrounds, shadowed cursor, XP style borders, active desktop, etc.
7. Try removing any unnecessary applications that are running in your system tray.
These eat up CPU cycles. You may also want to look at task manager to see what
other applications may be “lurking” around in the background. There are nice
utilities that help you manage these applications:
a. EndItAll -
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,697,00.asp
b.
StartupRun - http://www.webattack.com/Freeware/system/fwstartup.shtml
8. If you find that your system is still on the borderline in executing SDR-Console
you may want to try setting the OS to favor background tasks. Through the
Windows Control Panel go to the Advanced tab on the System Properties form.
Then select the Performance Settings and the Advanced tab. This will allow you
to set the Processor Scheduling to favor background tasks. DirectX is considered
by Windows to be a background task.
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