In Device Manager, look at the Properties for your CD-ROM and see if it has
been set for Digital CD Playback. If so, disable it and see if that improves
things.

Mart



"Matt J. McCullar" wrote in message
news
I was using Windows 98 for quite a while, but my hard drive crashed
recently
and I've since gotten a new hard drive and have upgraded to Windows ME.

With Win98, I used "CD Player" to listen to audio CDs, and I was very
pleased with it; no problems at all. I did not use Media Player for this,
as I kept hearing intermittent pops, clicks and gaps. With CD Player,
however, it was nice and clean, no matter what else I was running on the
computer.

With ME, however, I get the same poor audio quality with its CD Player. I
thought perhaps using another program to play audio CDs would help, and I
downloaded some freeware, but it didn't help much. I think whatever runs
the CD software gets interrupted by heavy CPU use. I did not have this
problem with Win98; no hardware is different. All I did was upgrade to
Win
ME.

I'm wondering if I'll simply have to get a faster motherboard. This one
is
over four years old and is running at about 900 MHz. I have 256 MB of
RAM.
I don't think it's a bad CD reader, as it worked fine previously.

I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!!!

Matt J. McCullar