I have a .NET app that plays sound for an extended period of time (multiple minutes) using a circular buffer. While the app is playing sound, its resource utilization is really low (zero disk use, less than 2% CPU, 30 MB memory) which is great! BUT it seems that while the app is playing sound Windows thinks the system is idle so it tends to spin up lots of background services which on low-end / budget systems (celeron CPU) can cause interruption of sound at times when the background services chew up all the system resources.
My question...Is there a way that I can make Windows understand that the system is NOT idle while my app is playing sound? Note that while the app is playing sound the user does NOT need to touch anything (keyboard, mouse, etc) which would of course cue the system that it is not idle. I have already tried messing with thread priority making it "Above Normal" or "High" but windows background services still misbehaved as described above.
Thanks!
