Music stutters on XPS M1530?

I'm listening to my music and hearing a quick stutter every once in a while. It's like a quick one second lag that happens even on idle at 63 processes. This is on a brand new laptop with nothing installed but the basic Dell Windows Vista Home Premium. Anybody experiencing this on their XPS? How can I fix this? Any ideas what could be causing this?

My laptop specs can be seen in my sig.

 

I dont have an XPS, but I do get this problem when using media player, no matter what I try. I don't have a stutter using itunes though.

 

Which program are you using to playback music files?

 

Yeah this is happening on the default installed Windows Media Player. I just installed Winamp and noticed it is doing the same...hmmm. Could it be my hard drive? It's making this crunching sound once every 5 seconds. I don't think that's normal.

I've talked to Dell customer service and they told me to restart and press F12 for diagnostics on disk drives, cpu, memory, etc.; I did it and it passed every test. I'm stumped.

 

Dell diagnostics ain't mean much. I've run them when my videocard was failing and they found nothing wrong. In a few hours after that the computer died completely.

 

Are you listenning from a CD or a file (mp3, wma, etc...)? In both case there could be stutter.
Does it skip a the same place on the song track? If so, it could be a damaged or poorly written CD or if it's from a MP3, you could have got errors during ripping/encoding. Try to play the music on another PC.

 

This is an MP3 mix that I've created on another computer. The mix should not have any stutters during the play because it never does on two of my other computers. The stutter does not happen at the same spot of the MP3 track, yet it is random on the track.

 

hey, what other programs are you running? sometimes i find that my music player starts to sputter when i have a bit torrent client running which is sending and recieving lots of data.


it might be another program that is causing it to skip, even if you processor is at 5%. i dont know whats causing yours or mine though.

*edit*your discription pretty much matches what i experience, and am right now as i type...

i use Utorrent, and the Zune media player, as well as WMP.

 

That's a good observation. I'd never thought it might be one of those running programs that came with the setup. I thought 4GB ram was fairly enough to hold out, but then agan it's Vista.

 

yah haha, i find when i turn off my torrent program the sputtering stops, so, i guess you just have to find out which program is interfering with it!

good luck.

 

ARe you using a wireless Internet connection? I've read that the drivers could cause this. Try updating your Sigmatel and wireless connection drivers.

 

I get the same on my m1330 and no amount of fiddling with the wireless or sound drivers fixes it.

 

I have noticed this, but i used to get on my old machine as well. Normally its after it has been on for say 3 or 4 hours, and after a restart its all normally fixed for me.