Dell M4500 headphone jack issue, M4500 owners please help.

Hi, I'm new to this notebook forum, lots of great information here.

So on to the issue, I had my M4500 for about a 1 year and 4 months now. The laptop is working perfectly for me except for one thing. I recently started using the headphone jack and I am noticing that whenever there is hard drive activity, a type of rustling static is emitted inside the headphones whenever the drive is accessed. This disrupts from headphone listening. I have tested different drivers in Windows, but there is no improvement and the same thing also happens in Linux (Ubuntu 11.10).

Can an M4500 owner test if their laptop does this also and possibly give me ideas as to what is wrong.

You can try to reproduce this by plugging in headphones to the laptop's port and setting the volume about mid-way while nothing is playing. Then you should launch some large programs and listen carefully for a rustling type of static which coincides with disk activity. My Windows power profile is set to balanced mode.

The specs of my laptop are in my public profile.

 

If the same thing happens on Linux then it is not a driver issue. You'll need to RMA it to Dell, unless you have On-Site repair and they will send a technician to your home/office.

 

Thank You for your reply. Dell had this problem on some other models before. I will wait and maybe someone who is an M4500 owner will reply and comment if they also have this issue. It might be more prevalent then it seems (unlikely though). Once I get more info I'll probably make use of my On-site repair as this is unacceptable for a laptop is this price range. They will have to ensure my satisfaction some way, so if repairs fail they will have to give me an equivalent product (quad core, M4600 successor)

Other M4500 owners please reply to my first post.

 

I have no issues with static on the headphone jack (or the docking station analog jack, either). In fact, this notebook has the best sound quality of any of the Dell notebooks I had so far

Sound is fine with:

- Ubuntu 10.04
- Windows 7
- Linux Mint 12 (Release Candidate, based on Ubuntu 11.10)

So: +1 to get On-site Service moving.

 

Thank You for your reply, recluce. I will use my onsite service, they will probably switch out the motherboard.