DV6T-SE speaker crackle and system restore

My dv6t-se that I bought in August will no longer play any sounds without a horrible noise coming from the right speaker. The noise is a cross between a crackle and a buzz, and makes listening to anything impossible. I've been on the phone with HP for hours, and they are convinced that I have a virus that's interfering with the audio drivers. Well they took control of the computer and reinstalled every single audio driver, flashed and updated the BIOS, and reinstalled the mediasmart program (why, I don't know).

The problem is still there, and as a last resort they tell me that I need to do a system restore, which I'm fine with in order to clean it up a bit. I'm off the phone with HP now, and I'm backing up my files now. My question is, what's the best way to do a system restore? Should I use recovery disks, Windows backup and restore, or just call HP back and see how they tell me to do it? I would just call HP and do it their way, but I feel like they almost don't know what they're doing here. Any help is appreciated

 

First of all, you mean system recovery. There's a difference.

Second, the only ways to do it are with the disks or the recovery partition, though you might be better off with a clean install. That way, you can be sure that it's not a hardware issue (though I think it might be) and you'll have a faster system.

 

I think he's better off doing a factory state install since he is guaranteed that it should work since he didn't noticed the problem until recently. If it fails, it pretty much easier to determine it's hardware failure that HP has to fix. This route is the most likely to convince HP for a real repair .

A clean install would trigger a HP support hell loop if it is a hardware problem.

 

True. I didn't consider that.