Just Another Blog
Thursday, July 11, 2002
 
Music Locks-up Your Windows XP?

Ever since I got Windows XP 13 months ago, I've had this strange problem. Any time I play music on WinAmp or any other device, I can't effectively run any other aplication. Things constantly freeze for anywhere from 15 seconds to 5 minutes at a time. Today I figured it out. Strangely enough, Windows XP is listening to what I'm playing. Apparently most computer manufacturers set the default XP setting to turn voice recognition on. It doesn't matter that I don't have a microphone plugged in, the computer has a default mic, and it wants to type the lyrics. Any place there is a text field, XP wants to fill in something that is coming through the voice recognition.

The fix is simply to turn off the voice recognition. You can see if it's running by going to the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete). Click the processes tab, and look for Sapisvr.exe. That's the culprit. Instead of explaining the whole fix, I'll just point you here. I did this this morning and was able to work at my computer, share music on Kazaa, and listen to tunes all the day long.

This has been the only problem that I have had with XP. It's fixed, and I'm happy. I finally suspected the voice recognition when the database I was trying to fill with phone numbers kept populating with they...were...they...were... Heck, that wasn't even the lyrics to the song - though my output is well removed from the input.