Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance?

When Vista launched, I immediately noticed that networking capabilities were over-complicated, but once things were configured properly, it was rather stable overall. However, one problem that did plague me was network performance, which seemed to drop when compared to my XP machines. I am not the one apparently, but there could be other reasons why network performance is ‘lagging’.

A forum thread at 2 CPU has a few posts from Vista users who have noticed a noticeable network performance hit whenever music was playing. Why this is, no one really knows, but Vista is not handling certain tasks as well as it could be. Many people in the forum have been experiencing the same problem, and if you are as well, you can relax in knowing you are not alone.

However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed.

Source: 2 CPU Forums, Via: Slashdot