Zune skipping problem found….and resolved

This may be a very unique situation, but I wanted to share it since I know many folks made registry tweaks to stop what we call "Vista disk trashing". I’ve been having issues with every single one of my Zune audio tracks on my Samsung Q1P: regardless of the song length, the audio skips precisely 20 seconds before the end of the song. It’s terribly annoying as I use the great sound of the Q1P all day long to listen to music I’ve downloaded from the Zune Marketplace with my Zune Pass subscription. My guess is that most folks don’t use a UMPC as their portable "Zune server" like I do: I store my tunes on the Q1P and sync the Zune hardware to it. Turns out the problem is easily resolved….

After James and I discussed the issue I went back to the registry tweaks we discussed a few weeks back. I really hadn’t experienced any disk thrashing but I did apply the registry tweaks like I suspect many of you did. My skipping problem has to be something local to my OS or disk since I’m not streaming the tunes, I’m simply playing back audio files that exist on my hard drive.

This morning, I undid one of the changes and the skipping problem is completely gone. Setting the DisablePagingExecutive value back to a zero fixed the problem. I’ve tested it on about half a dozen songs after the change and the audio is back to its smooth, silky sound. Just for kicks, I re-applied the change by setting that value to a one, played two songs and just like clockwork: the skip manifested itself 20 seconds prior to the song endings.

For the moment, I’m going to leave this particular registry value at the default of zero for a bit and see what happens. I’ll also do some more research into that particular value. It may well be that you may never see this type of issue if you’ve changed the key value, but if you get any file skipping that you can notice (which is easy for audio, harder for other file types), you may want to rethink this registry change.