e6500 crackling audio

Yep, same problem here. It somehow worsened the whole problem...

 

The audio skipping goes away when I disable the "a" band in my Dell 1510 Wi-Fi card properties in Device manager (atleast for now). I am using Vista Ultimate 32bit.

 

Disabling eSATA in the BIOS is what finally worked for me. I tried just about every other possible fix but none had any effect. Once I turned off eSATA, I got rid of the skipping and cracking completely. The integrated speakers in the E6500 still are crap but at least the skipping is gone.
Fortunately, I don't need eSATA as of now but that might change in the future. I hope Dell gets this figured out. I generally like this laptop but it has taken me days to get all the little issues fixed. The sound issue was just one of the many issues I had to work through. I have been in the IT industry for 18 years and never had this much issue with a laptop. Now if I could just get the TouchPoint drift fixed!

Here are my system specs:
Latitude E6500
A10 BIOS
Vista Business SP1 (32 bit) / Windows XP SP3 (Dual Boot)
4 GB Memory
250 GB 7,200 RPM Hard Drive
Intel WiFi 5300 AGN Wireless
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M
Dell Wireless Bluetooth Mini Card

 

I disabled the a-Band, e-Sata, I really did everything that people suggested, but the issue still isn't fixed in my case

 

Try disabling the entire Wi-Fi card.

 

Thing is, I use my notebook 90% of the time in my university. There I can only access the net via wlan. Hence, disabling Wi-Fi ain't a solution for me.

 

What BIOS version are you running wasabah?

 

It may not be the solution, but it may help in identifying the cause of the problem. There is one (or maybe more) hardware configurations which combine to cause the audio problems.

John

 

I can't seem to come up with any pattern. no ONE thing I do changes anything. I took this to the point of actually physically removing the Wi-Fi card and the Bluetooth card from the computer. I also disabled the wired LAN. WHen I removed the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth I formatted the HD and did a clean install of Windows Vista and then installed all the latest drivers from Dell for things that were necessary only. My audio/video skipping was worse than ever...with a severe skip every second. It was actually so pathetic I was laughing in disgust if anyone understands that... I think I've tried everything. Turning the eSata off didn't make a change at all, turning of the Virtual Monitor or whatever didn't do anything, no one thing I did in the BIOS or elsewhere would fix my problem.

So, I ended up putting my Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards back in since things were so bad it couldn't hurt. Currently I am running BIOS A11 and I have the Virtual Monitor AND the eSata turned off. I removed anything related to the Dell COntrol Point because it was crashing everytime I connected to the internet anyway. While the bluetooth card is installed, I have it disabled. I also have the wired LAN port disabled, along with the IDT soundcard (I'm using the Creative X-Fi card instead). Right now I'm still getting skips, though they only happen about every minute (instead of every second!!!), and they are notably shorter in duration when they happen.

I'm really kicking myself now for not returning this heap right away. There are a lot of great things about it, but this whole skipping thing has really lowered my opinion of Dell. After six laptops and one desktop from them I'm pretty sure this is the last. It's not just that it has the problem, but that Dell doesn't seem to have any interest in fixing it. I did send this system in once for this issue, it was gone two weeks, and it came back with more problems than it left with. And then Dell didn't follow up with me on what they did or the fact that the problem wasn't resolved.

Eventually I'm sure someone will crack this, but I doubt it will be Dell. Having to turn off half of the system's services only to achieve mediocre sound and video with this much processor is rediculous to say the least; especially since my ancient Dell Latitude (way back when) with a 233 MHz processor was able to play sound and video smoothly.

 

I'm sure there is a pattern to this. It can't happen at random. It's not a problem that i can help with because I've never heard it. My E6400 (P8600 + Intel GM45 + Intel 5100 wireless + AHCI + XP) plays audio that sounds OK to my ears although the dpc latency checker gets spikes into the red zone. Maybe my hearing is defective.

John