I've been using (struggling mainly) as a registered user now for a month or so. On the whole I am pleased with the product but it does ask some serious questions on my system.

I've opted for a dedicated laptop jukebox running onto a touchscreen. Laptop is a 1.2GHz, 512Mb RAM and no other applications running, only Ejukebox 3.997. I have problems often with CPU usage cycling between 30-80%, even with no music playing. Frequently there also seems to be spurious hard drive access (not from the drive where the music is stored either), this seems to be linked to the CPU usage it appears.

I just seem to think that the program could be better optimised, and certainly the recommended minimum spec is well out?

My db is at approx 37,000 tracks but would this be the cause of the problems?

I'd like very much to continue using the program as I like the Interface and stlye but I'm slowly being turned away because of these problems.

Regards

Mat

Its likely to be caused by the laptop itself, I run a 1.6ghz P4 Laptop chip with 1Gb of RAM and CPU usage fluctuates between 5 & 20%. I use a mixture of MP3 and lossless files and its typically lossless that causes the higher usage, I have about 12000 tracks. What is memory usage running at? (Press Ctrl - Alt - Del, click the performance tab and look under physical memory, you should have at least 20% spare).

If ram looks to be OK then try some of the following:
Fix the paging file size at about 2Gb
If an Intel based chipset try Installing or uninstalling the Intel Application Accelerator
Defrag the drives
Disable all power management options
Disable indexing on all hard disks

First I have to say, Krobar has given some very good tips. Give them a try.

Also, you may want to try disabling some of the animation effects under the eJukebox display options.

By far the biggest block to performance for eJukebox as well as most apps is hard drive speed. CPU and Memory are important but Hard Drives are the major source of slowness in PCs these days. Especially laptop hard drives which have a slower rotational speed. The good news is we will all probally convert to flash memory based hard drives once the price comes down. They are much faster, use less power, generate less system heat, and are totally silent. The PC/HTPC experience will benefit greatly once large flash based disks are available at reasonable prices. Also new hybrid hard drives are coming out soon which will feature a large flash based cache that should help improve performance. There are even some laptops in the works right now that have 32GB flash drives.

That said I will continue to look for ways to optimize eJukebox so it works faster on all systems.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Memory has never seemed to be a problem, plenty spare all the time. The drive with the music on is a USB 320GB, brand new so no need to defrag. I'll try some of your other suggestions though and let you know Krobar. I've already disabled a lot of XP already though.

All the Ejukebox animations are off, no transparancy etc..

I'll see how it goes, I've just left it rebuilding the database again while I go down the pub for the afternoon so I'll check it later.

Eventually seems OK, I was away for a week so didn't get chance to fix it straight away. I restored windows to a month ago, reinstalled my sound card / PCMCIA USB & Wireless adaptor drivers. Re-installed Ejuke, and rebuilt the db. I tried a few times to add the tracks at about 2 - 4000 a time but this didn't seem to move very fast. I decided to delete the db and just let it take the whole lot in one go.
This took some 24 hours to build - it started off very fast but slowed down to about 1/sec? No idea why this happened but I left it alone and eventually it finished. After a few restarts of ejukebox it now seems to work quite smoothly.

One other small point about Winamp (I know I should ask in the Winamp forums but I'm guessing that someone here should have the answer). I like to have winamp in winshade mode, with Winlyrics 'on top' where the next up section of Ejukebox is. I've set it to always on top but for some reason Ejukebox gets in front? I have to click the winamp in the taskbar to bring it up. It stays there after that but I want it to start there automatically as I run Ejukebox on a touchscreen and will eventually be starting it in fullscreen and don't want any need for user interaction.

Thanks again

Just one more thing hopefully! Playback is fine now apart from the first 5-10s of each song. There is hard drive access during this time (after the album cover has been downloaded only) and this causes some distortion on playback. I presume this is being saved to the program directory?
There is no activity on the drive where the mp3's are strored as far as I can tell.
The drives are all defragged, windows running as smoothly as I can get it. I've tried several different pagefile setups and that seems ok now.

Help please.

There is a new option that arrived in v3.999 Beta 2 called "Run in RAM - Performance Boost" on the "Other" tab. If you enable that eJukebox will use the hard drive less and keep everything in RAM which should help. Beta 4 is now available for download from the forums under the 'Latest Updates' section and v3.999 final should be out later this week.