PC Troubleshooting Questions and Answers - Problem Playing Streaming Audio

Cristy writes in with a troubleshooting question:
Question:Can you tell me why every time I try to listen to online radio the music is choppy, and often causes my system to crash?

Answer: MSN and Yahoo both use Windows media. What version of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player do you have? If you go to Help and then About it will tell you. For your version of Windows you should have Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 9 or 10.

Another problem may be your computer. Streaming audio can take a lot of processing power to run smoothly. If you are trying to do other things at the same time it will make the audio choppy. Although 128MB of RAM is fine for Windows 98 it may not be enough to give you smooth streaming audio.

Another thing can be your internet connection. Even though you have DSL, there are different speeds of DSL in use. You may not have a fast enough speed or if its prime time when everyone is online and listening to music from the same site it will slow it down.

I would check your versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player and then maybe test your connection by trying to listen to music late at night or early in the morning.

Windows Media Player download
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/...

Internet Explorer upgrade
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx...

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