I've got an old old laptop which I take to uni.

It has a 266MHz MMX, 96 MB RAM, a 10gig hardrive, and a crappy onboard sound card. I output my music through Creative laptop speakers, ones that cost around £15 from a famous highstreet catalogue shop. Evidently I am not an audiophile. Most my music is in MP3 128kbps CBR, (though I'm now using Ogg q4)

But I do like my music while I'm working. Can anyone reccomend a music player that will work on my computer and not throw a hissy fit when I want to run MS Word, or play minesweeper, open the start menu (heh) or whaterver. A media player that uses few system resources is what I'm wanting. Can anyone recommend one?

Basically I'd like mp3, ogg support, and a media library would be nice.

I've used Winamp 2.91, Winamp3 (RIP), and now Winamp 5.08. I love winamp, but have got to thinking that all its whizzy bits are a bit wasted (and wasteful) on my kit

Also, I'm wondering whether there is any difference in memory/processor usage if I'm playing ogg or mp3? As ogg takes longer to encode, does that mean it takes more power to decode? Just a thought.

Cheers

The hiss/screech when something happens on the screen is probably related to BUS mastering of old hardware. I saw it a lot in the 90's when computers used PCI sound cards and PCI display adapters. It's especially painful when browsing a web page with smooth scrolling enabled.

It's not caused by insufficient system resources per se, but instead the system's inability to drive two PCI cards at once.

I remember that some sound card / display adapter drivers had a "Alternative BUS Mastering" or "Increased (or decreased) BUS Priority" configuration options which would solve the problem. Unfortunately my memory on ancient drivers and hardware is a bit flaky so I can't remember exacly where that kind of setting could be found. Probably somewhere around the Windows device manager.

Thanks, I'll give it a look.

Mostly though the playback is fine, just when I try to do anything other than sit at the computer and listen (i.e. work) does the music go all jumpy on me. Especially when Word autosaves and the music is playing

Ok, that could be caused by insufficient system resources. The BUS mastering screech is usually related to something happening on the screen instead of the HDD. It's still worth investigating though since the HDD also shares the PCI bus.

Some extra memory could help since with 96 MB I suspect the OS is doing a lot of swapping that could stall the audio playback.

Maybe I should point out that my laptop is REALLY REALLY old.

96MB is the most it can take!

I dont know about Ogg, Foobar2000 can be quite lite, for mp3s try coolplayer and ultraplayer -these try to be small and fast.

I think "Hissy fit" meant just going into lots of paging, not literally hissing.

An old 2.something version of WInamp is pretty light. That's what I generally used on a couple of 165 mhz, 80 mB machines. The big thing is avoiding other memory hogs.

If 'paging' means jittery playback then yes.

Thanks for your help everybody