M1330 Sound problems...

Hello!

I am reading here for quite a while now, but never posted so far. This is a great forum, and I already got some nice advice! Thanks!

I am a Dell customer from Germany, who bought the M1330 some two weeks ago, and so far I am pretty impressed by it. I got it with the T8300, a 200GB HD with 7.200rpm, and 3GB Memory. I use Vista Home Premium.

One major thing bothering me though are the sound glitches, which have been discussed here, but to no prevail. I am talking about those glitches in sound playback during listening to MP3s with Winamp or just watching a movie and so on. It appears like there is no hardware buffer or something like that.

It was suggested here to turn of 802.11a and install newer or older versions of the sound driver, which did not help in my case. It was suggested to turn of SpeedStep or overclock the graphics adapter, which are two ways not practical to me since this would be at the cost of battery time. And also - stuff like that should just not be neccessary, right?

This is supposed to be a multimedia laptop, and this problem and the fact that solving it seems so difficult is just odd.

Has anyone succesfully solved it without overclocking or switching off SpeedStep?

Thanks for your help!

Matthias

 

The wireless, video drivers, and speedstep fixes never worked for me, but one thing you can try is to right click on the sound icon in the system tray, select playback devices, double click the speakers/headphones icon, and go to the enhancements tab. Select "disable all enhancements."

I think it is some issue with Vista trying to do something fancy with the sound that the motherboard/drivers don't support. This fixed it for me. Good luck!

 

Hello!

Thank you so much for your reply and your suggestion. Unfortunately it did not solve my problem... I just don't know what's going on. I find this sound issue more and more ridiculous. It's just not supposed to be like this. With a computer bought in 2008. A multimedia computer, that is.

I still hope there is a way to solve this!

Thanks

Matthias

 

I've not been able to solve this after trying all the wireless, audio enhancement etc suggestions on this forum.

 

I tried everything to fix it to no avail as well. So as a last ditch effort I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch.

I installed Vista x64 SP1 with the m1330 connected to the net using wired ethernet. As soon as windows installed I let it update all the drivers itself through windows update.

This installed everything except the biometrics driver and the sigmatel drivers. Now install the sigmatel drivers. Disable the playback enhancements and test to see if your still having any sound problems.

This seemed to solve it for me.

I know its a real pain in the butt to reinstall everything but it worked.

So good luck.

 

Wow, to actually install an entirely new OS just to fix a sound problem like this sounds like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. But it sure points towards Vista as being responsible for the problem...

Is that really the ONLY way? I think I am not prepared to actually do that. Oh, and I don't have Vista x64 anyway.

Thanks anyway!

Matthias

 

You could get the sound card that fits in the Express card slot.

 

Hello!

Thanks for your advice!

The direction these tips go though makes me wonder why Dell is not seeing this problem. I mean it seem obvious that the configuration these computers are shipped in (most come with Vista Home Premium), a decent sound output is not possible. But from Dell we seem not to hear a peep concerning this.

It leaves me puzzled.

Matthias