M6400 Audio hiccup issue

Hmmm, so what's that bluetooth audio (3 entries in device manager) for?

After disabling all of them the hiccups were gone. At least for me

 

I'm glad the disabling of band of 802.11a has solved the audio glitch on another machine. I wish I could credit the person who figured that out but I can't remember where I read that workaround. It might have even been in here somewhere. Hope it helps others too.

David

 

So disabling the card seems to help but I cant figure out how to just disable the 802.11a band only.
How do I do this?

Thanks a bunch!!!!

 

ANYONE?

How do I disable only the 802.11a band??

thanks

 

This looks like it would do it, though I'm not experiencing the stuttering:

Right click on Computer. Click Manage and go to Device Manager.

Pull down the Network Adapters section.
Right-click your wifi card and go into Properties.

Under the Advanced tab, there should be a list of properties and a value field. Mine is the Intel WifiLink 5100 A/G/N, so yours might have different properties if it's not that.

For mine, I have a property called "Wireless Mode" that lets me set which frequencies the card communicates on.


I have to ask though - those of you getting audio clicks and pops in music, what is the volume on the computer itself set to? Laptops generally have more audio chip interference than desktops. I can typically hear my mouse events being processed by the computer with the volume all the way up on headphones. If you have the main volume all the way up, and the MP3 program volume set low, you will get the maximum effect of any interference that hits the sound chip. (To check, right click the system tray speaker icon and click Open Volume Mixer.)

 

Disabling the eSATA port in the BIOS worked for me on my Dell Precision M6400, thanks a lot!

Joachim Kruyswijk

 

I've got a Dell Precision M6400.
The audio had worked perfectly until fairly recently - the last significant change I made was that I tried using HDMI, and there were a few glitches going on (a loud pop every time audio started playing). I updated the BIOS and some drivers, and such, but the thing that fixed *this* issue was to change the sampling rate in Windows 7 to 44.1 KHz (the default was 48KHz).

The funny thing is that a little while after this, I noticed a rather peculiar problem... audio from the laptop speakers would skip and cut out all the time - not the playback itself, which continued fine, but the *sound* from the speakers would cut out all the time, so it didn't look like a buffering or I/O problem.

The really weird part is that when you use headphones, the audio is *perfectly fine* through the headphone jack - but when you unplug the headphones, it stutters and pauses through the speakers constantly to the point of being unlistenable.

How odd... does anyone have an explanation for this? It's *not* operating system specific, because I dual boot between windows XP (a brand new installation) and Windows 7, and it happens the same under both OSes, regardless of how I configure the audio interface.

One thing I did discover about the M6400 (under Vista/7 only) is that you can actually use the headphone jack as a completely independent audio interface if you set up a program to use that interface first - then when you're using that, you can play audio *independently* through the main speakers. So it does sort of make sense that the speakers could have different problems than the headphone jack... but still, this is weird and annoying. I'd love to fix it.

Has anyone else experienced something like that?

 

Oh nice... now that I b*#ch about it the problem suddently goes away on its own. As a technician, I don't particularily like that...

[edit]
Hmm... playing around with plugging the headphones in. On occasions it seems that if I unplug headphones the sound doesn't come back to the speakers, and I have to plug and unplug a few times before it does.

This makes me think that my whole problem might have something to do with buggery jack detection happening. I had a hardware problem along these lines on my old cell phone, a Treo 650 - it thought that wired headphones were plugged into the 2.5mm jack so that sound wouldn't play out the speakers during phone calls and you *had* to use it with a headset of some sort.

That was really annoying... I hope my M6400 isn't developing a hardware issue like this! Perhaps it was plugging the headphones in that "made it go away" for now. I wonder if Dell's BIOS or drivers might relate to this functionality, because as previously mentioned, I can play something else out the headphone jacks (i.e. using software like Virtual DJ or telephony software) and then it still plays out the speakers even if headphones are plugged in.

 

On my M6400 I was getting a startup sound stutter and also random hics when playing mp3s etc.

I solved it by removing all the Dell Control Point clart. Nothing else changed.
Ok, so I no longer a pretty picture on the screen when I change the screen brightness or volume, and I can no longer program hotkeys to launch my own apps...but that is no great loss to me.

I don't use the fingerprint reader so the lack of the DCP makes no odds to me at all. Everything else works just fine.

I am running Vista x64, with RAID0 hard disks and when wireless on a "g" network, and when docked on a wired 1Gb network.

 

Yeah, I noticed that stutter at startup, but otherwise playing audio worked okay, once windows was started. That controlpoint stuff is rather bloated - I can't say I think dell made it very streamlined!