This has been discussed several times, but all the solutions handed out (that I saw) didn't work. System Specs: WinXP Pro AMD Thunderbird 1ghz 256 MB DDR-266 ASUS A7A-266 Mobo Generic(?) 40X16X10 CD-RW Maxtor 40gig ATA 133 HD, NTFS Basically, whenever the CD rom is accessed for reading, it speeds up to it's max speed, then reads away. No problem, as long as that's the only thing that's happening. Most sound skips frequently (not CD audio - I mean mp3s, wavs, anything else), IE: Every "click" on the CD-Rom is a skip in the sound. This also affects games, which also "wait" for the CD-Rom. It is it's own Master (Secondary Master IDE, no Slave), and all in all, this is mighty frustrating. My only thought is to try and force it to slow down.. persay to a 12x CD-Rom. Any suggestions?

Please be more clear about the problem you are having. You did not mention the sound card/chip you are using.

This may not be the cause of your problem, but I had similar glitches on my old machine until I noticed that XP had installed my 50x CD-ROM in PIO mode. I went to device manager and changed the transfer mode on the corresponding IDE channel to "DMA if available." No more slowdown when copying files from my CD-ROM, and no more skips in sound.

Max speed is great for binary files, not great for sound and vid files as the drive often has to "go back" and reread. Nice CD tweaking tool here: http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/freefile/story/0,24330,3366746,00.html

Thanks for the advice. The CD Tweaking tool "worked" but didn't. The CD-ROM is in fact in PIO mode, and it won't change for one reason or another. I'm thinking the IDE cable is at fault there. So I'm going to have to figure out how to swap the cables around or something.. Thanks again though! Colin