Windows Media Player 7.1

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Anybody had a good experience with WMP 7.1? I’m still using version 6.4 per recommendations by Woody and other Win newsletters who have reported that it’s bloatware. I did finally install IE55 SP1 (5.50.4522.1800IC) and have had no problems with it – but I retained version 6.4 of WMP. The problem with newsgroups is that you always hear the negative reports because people are trying to get solutions. When things work well no one posts.

So, how about some posts by people who have had positive experiences with WMP 7.1. I downloaded it and would love to install it. Am I overly cautious or what??????

TIA

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I thought it was an exceptional program given its capabilities — I liked the ease in copying from CD to HD, and the visuals and skins were nice — but it did have some considerable drawbacks. Although the program itself is small, it uses up a huge amount of resources when running. At home, even when no other programs were running, it exceeded my system capacity; my office pc is much more capable, but it is usually running at close to a constant 100% cpu usage (Win, multiple network sessions, Excel, Access, Outlook and others, frequently simultaneously) without tossing in entertainment extras. The only other “drawback” is it does not support running multiple instances simultaneously.

Is it bloatware? Absolutely! Is it a good program? If you have a robust enough system, definately. The added bells and whistles make it an enjoyable program to run.

(FYI, I now use WMP 6.4 for playing video, but WinAmp for audio. Home pc is pentium 120, 48MB ram; office is celeron 400, 64MB ram.)

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Given your hardware specs, WiMP 7 will be fine – if you run nothing else. It’s a hog, and for all the eye candy, it does nothing that many other media players out there will do. I’d recommend as a replacement….

UltraPlayer.

It does everything that WiMP 7x does, everything WinAmp does, and a little more. And it’s not real bad on the resources, either. Skinnable, Visuals, the whole schmeer is here.

Can you tell I’m no fan of WiMP 7? I run an Athlon 1.2GHz machine with 512MB DDR SDRAM as my daily driver and it *still* puts a huge dent in my system’s resources. Microsoft didn’t get it right this time.

Any particular reason why you want to try it so badly?

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Thanks to all for the reports. Not one of you recommend it. I currently use MusicMatch as my MP3 player but I’ll look at Winamp and Ultraplayer as subs. MusicMatch is nice but it’s pretty piggish with resources.

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FWIW, I’ve used winamp for quite some time, and don’t have any compaints… it’s perfect for that MP3 collection I *don’t* have…

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This isn’t going to be very popular, but… I use Windows Media Player 7.00.00 1956 on a creaking Pentium ll system and it performs faultlessly for playing the CDs I mainly use it for.

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Popular or not, if it works, go fer it!! I am admittedly a purist when it comes to digital audio.

And I would also have to agree with the earlier post that stated that MusicMatch was a resource hog…..cuz it is.

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Just to throw something in from left field… a nifty little program that has been mentioned a number of times in the software finds forum for graphics is IrfanView. With a plugin irfanview now plays mp3s, cd tracks etc……

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