Weird networking problem

[The JoJo]

Here's the info I have so far, I'll try to get some more info later.

Friends problem:
Quite new Acer laptop, using WinXP if I remember correctly. When he connects to the internet via (IRDA or) a PCMCIA GPRS modem, the network will be slow, until the fires up media player! When media player plays something, there will be no packet loss, and a download might work with about 4KB/s. When he shuts down wmp, the downloads drops to about 0.5-1KB/s.

Whattaheck?

This is beyond me at the moment, does anyone have any experience from something similar? I know the amount of info is a bit limited, sorry.

 

[blakerwry]

so you can start a download in say IE.. it goes ~1KB/sec.. start media player, instantly the download becomes 4KB/sec and upon closing media player the download drops back to 1KB/sec?

Does somethign simialr happen when pinging?

 ping yahoo.com -t

what protocols are affected (http, ftp) or programs (mozilla, IE, etc)?

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe he's getting better compression on the stuff that's coming through media player? I can't really believe that's the case, but that's sure what it looks like.

Ping only measures latency, not throughput. I'm not sure the results of a ping would be helpful.

 

[blakerwry]

Maybe he's getting better compression on the stuff that's coming through media player? I can't really believe that's the case, but that's sure what it looks like.

Ping only measures latency, not throughput. I'm not sure the results of a ping would be helpful.

he mentioned packet loss...

 

[The JoJo]

Exactly blakerwry. Even the pings are affected. Couldn't get hold of the chap, gotta try again tomorrow.

Weird...

 

[Handruin]

random thought, any chance this is an odd issue with a sound card driver and a network driver, or further, some type of IRQ stearing issue?

My thought was that media player might initial the sound card causing some type of system change.

Could you try this with another audio related product like winamp and see if anything changes?

 

[The JoJo]

Just got word from my friend. Playing music with wmp does not affect the situation, only playing video. And it doesn't matter if the video is full-screen of minimized to the taskbar.
He doesn't have winamp installed, yet.