M1530 Audio Stutter/Solutions/DPC Latency Spike

Hey everyone. I decided to upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate after having run XP Pro on my M1530 for the past 6 months. XP ran flawlessly on the machine, but I wanted to bring the software up to speed with what's currently on the market. So far everything is fine except for on minor issue. I am having a random spikes of DPC latency that are causing a brief 'stutter' or 'crackle' when playing audio or video files. The problem was initially quite bad, but after installing the drivers found at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=335383 for the WLAN 1505 card the problem has gotten significantly better. But as you can see, it is still an issue:



Has anyone here experienced similar issues, and if so does anyone know what might be causing this spike and how to go about fixing it? Thanks for your help!

 

I'm also interested in this because I know Creative's X-Fi Notebook has stuttering and popping for related reasons.

 

I think I might have found a solution to my own problem here. Using the drivers found on http://www.xps-wiki.com/wiki/M1530_Vista_Drivers, I updated the drivers for the touchpad and Bluetooth module (all the other drivers on my system are current with the ones listed on the site), and at this point I don't seem to be having any audio interference as the result of DPC spikes.

 

I had a feeling it was a driver issue, not hardware related. I did the opposite. Went from Vista to XP and XP solved the stuttering problem. I'm still waiting for Windows 7, but I may return to Vista. Thanks for the headsup!

 

Yea, it was one of the reasons I downgraded to XP shortly after I bought the machine. This is only my first day back on Vista, but now that I have resolved this issue I'm quite pleased. We'll see how it turns out.

 

Previously I suspected the possibilty of Broadcom's (Broadcom makes the 1505 as well as the 1395 for Dell) hardware itself being responisble for these ridiculously high DPC spikes. They do indeed cause audio stutter.

After trying every driver available for the 1395 wireless, and seeing no change, I wasn't sure if this was hardware or driver related. If you have fixed the problem with the 1505 by changing drivers, this supports the idea that the drivers are the problem and Broadcom has finally done something about this.

Are you saying that those spikes that were up to about 35,000 microseconds have disappeared? What is their peak now?

Edit: I can't really see what your max latency is on that snapshot, however I can assure you that those spikes went past 35,000 microseconds on the machine that I had with a Broadcom wireless (1395). Incidentally, an Intel 3945 cured that Vostro 1500 of this problem.

 

If anyone is still interested in this: Accidentally, I managed to get my dpc latency from roughly 1000-1500us to under 500us 90% of the time (lots of green - looks like XP graphs now) by enabling HLT command in rmclock. I solved the huge red spikes by DLing modded wireless drivers mentioned above.

Best,
MT