Buzzing/stuttering during audio playback on xps 13 9333

I've spent the entire morning and afternoon agonizing over this issue after it reared its ugly head watching netflix last night. Thankfully, I now have my XPS 15 L502X - Win 7 64bit premium system happily purring again. I had a couple of different things happen.  Interestingly, I uninstalled both Dell apps (Dell System Detect and Dell Support Assistant), but still had the Dell System Detect loading in my tray after reboot. Here's what I ended up doing:

1) Tried the uninstall first - failed.

2) Create a System Restore Point

3) Full export of my Registry ...  because you're doing to manually edit the registry after.

4) Open task manager and click on processes tab

5) Right-click on DellSystemDetect and select Open File Location

6) Delete the entire folder where that file lives.

7) Click Start button and search for "regedit" - open it up.

8) Search for (Ctrl - F) dellsystemdetect (not case sensitive), and remove ever instance of it, including Keys, Values & Data.

9) Do a cold reboot to ensure a clear re-start.

Done.  Purrs like a kitty

Cheers.

I'd just like to thank you very much - for the last week or so this problem has been plaguing me whenever I watched a Youtube video - I even had most of my laptop replaced (albeit for other reasons), and I was surprised that this didn't fix the problem.

To everyone: do what he says and uninstall the Dell Support Assist programs.

Good call! Thanks :)

thanks very much for this...your solution worked fine!  Have been frustrated for days with the annoying noise. It also seemed to interfere with webconferencing tools.  Like others tried replacing drivers etc with no resolution.  One would think Dell would post a resolution or make a fix promptly since they are aware of it.

Thanks a lot for your answer! I was terribly annoyed by these small freezes.

Removed both Dell support services as well, and it works fine now.

Regards,

Jean-Marc

My collegue and I had the same problem on our vostro 3750 and studio 17 laptop. It remembered that it started at 12 feb in the evening. It costed around 8 hours to find out what the source of the problem was. At 12 feb Dell support assist was installed on our laptops and after that our music streams were disrupted every minute or so, in fact  even working in a word document was disrupted for a second every minute. Now I have removed the program and dell support agent and now it works again without these disruptions. Thanks to this forum, thank you all! And shame on you Dell to install such malware on our systems.

Cheers,

Freek

Performed this fix, worked!!! Big thanks to the poster. I was worried there was a bigger issue at hand. Im really glad that the fix is so simple, however Im extremely worried about Dell distributing sh***y updates that cause such massive issues in systems. 

Thanks Wildmanyeah,

Dell - sort it out !

Defenitly fixed the problem.I had to do a system restore to remove supportassist, but no more skip and buzzing. Thanks.

You could create a restore point, then go into the Uninstall Programs, sort by date, and uninstall things installed since you noticed the problem - most people here had it since about 2/11/15.  Uninstall one or two things, reboot, check until you've covered the newer things installed.  If that works, great.  Otherwise, you could then restore to your restore point if you want to try other things.  You could also try coming up in safe mode (F8) and see if it happens there, when many things are not loaded.  If that works, then the problem is software and it's a matter of finding which software item loaded during the boot process is causing the problem.

I think this is a hard problem to diagnose.  I tried installing the Microsoft default audio driver and it also had problems, leading me to conclude that it was a hardware issue.  However, the Dell Assist programs were affecting other parts of the system, not just audio, but I didn't realize that.  I feel fortunate that I found Wildmanyeah's solution here.

I am having the same problem with my Dell xps 13. I uninstalled both of the Dell Assist programs - using the Uninstall Programs - but the problem continues. It is incredibly annoying. Can anyone suggest something else I should do ?

@Stvlwyer.... Fire up Task Manager.  Go to View => Update Speed and set it to "High" to increase the sensitivity necessary to observe the problem".  Display "Processes" and click on CPU to sort the CPU column to descending, high to low. Now fire up some music or what ever it takes to hear the problem.

Watch the task manager screen and when the "bzzzt" sound happens, you should see the responsible process or service pop up to the top of the process column.  Mine was the Delldatavault service, but I think you have already uninstalled that.  You will have to watch task manager for several minutes to catch and confirm the culprit. Also, display the clock such that it shows seconds. Then you'll know just when the "bzzzt" is about to happen as it occurs at exactly 60 second intervals.  

.... Don 

I'm new to this Dell Forum, and I can't see that it's possible to put links into these postings (if it is, someone please tell me!).

Hello Randy. Thanks for contributing to the forum.

If you want to make a word or words into a link, highlight the word or words, then click the link button on the toolbar. (Find the smiley face and go 4 to the left -- it is in the shape of links in a chain but is grayed out until a word is highlighted). When the pop up dialog opens, paste the link address into the top box -- in other words replace the word in the box with the address.

Skip the "anchor" box. You can skip the "target" box but I always select "open in a new Window" so that when a person clicks on the link the browser will open a new tab and not navigate away from the thread. Skip the "title" line then click "Insert".

If you rather make a link out of a naked url address, paste the address into the post and press your Enter key. The forum software sometimes automatically makes it into a link, but if not just highlight the address and use the link button to make it a link.

When I followed Randy's post about going into Device Manager and looking under System for remaining entries for Dell Assist, I found that BOTh of the items Randy pointed out were still in the list - although I had deleted the programs. I followed what Randy indicated - disabling the two items - and have had no problems.

I should also point out that a later post indicates that using Task Manager one can pinpoint the actual problem if it isn't the Dell Assist (for example Dell Datavault - which I had already deleted some time ago). I didn't have to go that route because Randy's suggestion had already fixed the issue for me.

Steve 

Thanks, Jim! It's simply my "refrigerator problem" at work. That is, my wife asks me to get the guacamole from the frig, I look but can't find it, she has to come and point it out to me right under my nose. An oft-repeated scenario!

So here is the link I wanted to take people to.