The same is true when running Winamp. When I was dabbling with FreeBASIC many years ago, my games performed better when I was listening to music. Same reason!

>Windows Energy-saving timer heuristics

Another example of Windows' technical debt being there, low-hanging fruit-wise, to be cashed in by performance-oriented developers. Its interesting that Youtube changing the timer resolution propagates to other threads .. does this harken to darker days in the MSDOS era? Youtube, another Turbo button?