e6500 crackling audio

For what it's worth, before I returned it, my E6500 with Vista Business and A09 Bios had crackling audio.

 

I'm all confused again...

So, after disabling my Wi-Fi adapter last week my audio/video skipping went away. Today I was out and about and decided to turn the Wi-Fi back on so I could use the network where I was, with the intention of turning it back off before listening to music. So, that's what I did and of course the audio/video skipping returned. Later I turned the Wi-Fi back off and guess what? The skipping was still there and worse than ever!!! I decided maybe I should just reboot, so I did and it didn't get rid of the skipping. Well, since it was available I went ahead and updated my BIOS to A09. This seems to have greatly reduced the problem and I am getting very infrequent skipping now.

Now I'm not so sure where the problem is coming from. It's seeming more and more like it's just a general interaction problem between several (or maybe all?) hardware devices and/or their drivers. Weird...

Everytime the skipping returns I want to send this thing back and tell Dell where to shove it!!!

Oh yeah, I'm also having trouble with Dell Control Point now. Whenever I sign into my Verizon Wireless service the Control Point stops working.

 

John, I am an IT person since 30 years and I do hate automatic updates. While automatic updates maybe usefull to many, they remain risky. What I am asking for is a tool that analyses the BIOS/driver versions on the installed system and automaticly offers me updating/changing to other BIOS/driver versions available on Dells site using a secure connection. So I can decide wich update I want to install and when... But even such a tool doesn't exist from Dell. Basicly all business systems I do have here from other manufacturers do have such tools since many years.

But this is different subject... let's go back to the more severe latency problems...

 

its possible to get clean audio output using asio4all driver(foobar, winamp has asio4all plugins). But you wont get any other sound from windows(not sure about xp) while player is playing. Such solution is fine for me

 

Has anyone else noticed that the audio skipping gets worse throughout the day if you use sleep or hibernate a couple times? On a fresh boot I have very very few audio skips, but as the day goes on it gets worse - especially if I put the computer to sleep a couple times.

 

I've been running DCP Latency Checker int he background and noticed every 4 seconds I get a huge spike higher than the maximum. Then for some reason it just stopped spiking and is in the green now.

Very strange laptop.

 

Some more observations and I notice that Latency spikes every 4 seconds off the chart but then after a few minutes of idling it dies down.

I've rebooted several times and notice the same behavior with the exception of 1 time out of 5 where the latency spikes up.

On another occasion after the latency stays green I notice it started to spike up every 4 seconds for no reason at all too. It's very very strange.

 

I had the same issue. After about three cycles of hibernation/sleep - wake up the sound skipping was almost constant and the machine had to be rebooted.

I have been able to get rid of the skipping issue completely by making a clean install of the OS (Vista 32bit Ultimate), BIOS (A09) and all the drivers. For the sound I use the Windows default drivers instead of the IDTs. Also I haven't installed any of the Dell's own software.

edit: I also have the Intel 5100 wifi with the A band disabled.

 

Do you find that the Windows default drivers sound better than the IDT's?

 

Thanks for the input - I plan to do the same thing in a few weeks after I'm done with finals for this semester. Hopefully it will eliminate my problems as well. Did you install the drivers provided on the dell support website or did you install the most recent ones from the manufacturers?