Sound crackles on HP dv6000 laptop -- looking for a generic audio driver

Hello,

I have an HP dv6000 laptop (specifically, the dv6449us). I'm currently using the Conexant High Definition Audio driver for my sound card.

The sound crackles very often: every 10 seconds or so. It makes it very difficult to listen to music, watch movies, or do pretty much anything that requires sound. It's system-wide, and it happens regardless of whether or not I plug in external speakers or headphones.

Now here's the weird part: the sound works perfectly in Ubuntu Linux (I dual boot). Based on this, I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware issue. I suspect this has something to do with the driver.

I've tried many things: I reinstalled the driver by downloading it from the HP Support website. I also used the recovery manager to reinstall the audio driver. Neither of these helped. Next, I disabled all audio enhancements in Vista's control panel -- again, no cookie.

I contacted HP support, but all they did is basically tell me I shouldn't go around installing Linux on their laptops, and their proposed solution is to wipe my hard drive using Kill Disk, and reinstall Vista from scratch. *Sigh*

I would appreciate help with this! The crackling audio problem makes it nearly impossible to do anything involving sound on this laptop.

So is there any setting I could try changing?

Is there a generic audio driver I could use? I don't need "high definition audio" or anything fancy like that -- just something very compatible, very generic, but something that actually works!

Thank you in advance!

 

Sorry that I can't help OP, but I just had to remark on that.
Jeez, why do people have to be so damn proprietary?
-_-'

 

Possible causes since issues are only on Vista:

-Drivers
-Wireless card (it fixed it for dells by modifying a wlan setting)
-SP1

 

flipfire, thank you very very much for your list of suggestions. I would have never thought of checking the wireless card for sound problems.

I'm finally getting somewhere. Disabling the wireless card in Vista's device manager results in crystal clear audio! The effect is immediate (no reboot required). Re-enabling the wireless card re-introduces the snap, crackle, pop audio problem, and again, quite instantaneously.

But obviously, I don't want to have to have to choose between either Internet or sound.

flipfire, do you remember which settings you changed? That would be really helpful. Where did you change them? Was it in Device Manager -> Network Adapters -> (your wireless card) -> Properties -> Advanced? Or somewhere else?

All help is welcome. I'm much, much closer to solving this problem than I ever had been in the last 6 months.

 

Go into the wireless adapter hardware properties and disable 802.11a support and click Apply

Ta-da! hopefully...

What WLAN card do you have anyway?

 

Windows Device Manager reports that it's a Broadcom 4321AG 802.11a/b/g/draft-n (although Ubuntu reports that it's Broadcom 4328, and I'm not sure who's right).

I tried disabling 802.11a, but unfortunately, that wasn't the culprit... darn.

Other suggestions?

I'll be going through the list of all 25 settings I could change. Considering there are several options for each of these settings, it could take a while, so if anyone could offer advice, I would welcome it.

 

Disable which ever Wireless modes you dont use.

If that doesnt work, try different drivers. (updated and even outdated)

 

I have the same problem. But my laptop is not produced any sound at all. When I dualboot to Kalyway 10.5.2 I can play movie, listen to music like normal. I tried to disable wireless like mention above. But without any luck.

BTW, Im running windows vista business edition with sp1. Is there any method I can solve this issue?

 

What vista drivers are you currently using?

 

I tried outdated and lastest driver but still no luck

 

Do you have a realtek or conexant audio card?

Can you state your model #?

 

I have conexant audio card. My laptop model is DV6000 CTO.