Weird sound issue XPS 17(L702x)

Hello Zhiki,

    My new laptop, barely six months old, sufferd this problem. I talked to Dell Guys online, they just could not pin the problem. A wild guess was made and my hard disk was replaced. The computer worked fine for a couple of days then again started to stutter and crack. Now was the turn to replace mother board. I got the thing replaced but the problem prevailed. My laptop was formatted as many times I called Dell and the O.S. reinstalled. The quality of this problem is that whenever you make any changes to your system, the problem hibernates and resurfaces later on. I lost lot of precious data (I am a research student, and just can't afford to loose the results that I get after lot of hard work and toiling day and night in lab). I have been following this thread and many such threads for over  six months by now. All I can tell you is that this problem may have many reasons. I had it solved temporarily by turning off my wifi switch while listening songs or watching movies. Then there was a post on updating the intel rapid storage driver.After I have updated this, my laptop is working fine, God knows till when. This problem is a real pain when you buy the best config available that your money can buy. 

   I live in a hostel where there are more than 200 laptops but it is only Dell that has this problem. I hope Dell listens this and does something to fix this permanently and save their customers (I haven't recommended Dell to anyone since I had this problem). Had Dell produced a good fix for me, my hostelwould have had more Dells...

Thank you, Jamy.

I, also have been a Dell follower for a long time. I used to recommend Dell to all my friends and family. I am a Electrical Engineer and I make my living as a Sr. Software Developer whom works remotely for a phone company in NY city. This problem kind of put my job on the line which makes matters worst.

I bought it to replace a Lenovo T60 which has lasted my 6 years.

I received the unit on December 21st.  One week later I started hearing first like a water drop and then a chirping noise.  I read multiple forums and tried multiple solutions at no avail. Even the one that worked for you. As soon as the sound started happening more often I decided to bump by back ups to a daily set up. Therefore when the unit crashed and died totally I only lost less than 20 hours worth of e-mails and 5 hours of development.

Last week I decided to try the Blu ray disk and to my surprise it could not read Blu Ray disks either.  Back then I contacted Customer support and decided to have the unit replaced. I am still under the guarantee and of course this was a faulty unit. They told me it will take at least 15 days to get the replacement unit. So, I decide to wait. I thought it was just bad luck.

In the mean time I kept on investigating and reading reviews and it seems the problem is happening more often than expected. Yesterday, the system crashed and It does not even boots up anymore. Right there I called Dell and Cancel the exchange and I am in the market for another laptop.

In fact we should not expend hours trying to fix a Hardware/software problem which should not be happening in the first place. The unit has the latest of technologies.

Anyways, I have to tell you that Customer Support has been very accommodating and have listened to my needs and complains very professionally.

I am looking for 1 TB at  least 8 GB Ram. and 17 inches display.. any suggestion?

I am incline to go for a Toshiba or ASUS which according to PC mag have very high reviews.

dont worry u wont listen that distortion again

I also tough the issue was solved after some trials an errors but it came back and the last time the PC died entirely on me.

I found ASUS G74SX-DH72 It looks like a very good and reliable system.

Kudos to Dell customer support which allowed me to send the laptop back - death after only 20 days of usage.

I swear to god I still close my eyes and heard the chirping noise coming from the mother board.

Hi Waqaas/all

I think your solution worked. i un-installed McAfee and so far so good. i havn't heard any of the audio distortion /Lag. fingers crossed it works.

I also explicitly told the computer i had 8 cores in MSCONFIG.

im not a 100% sure which solution fixed it but it works thank god!!!

Finally BF3 without any glitching!

thanks to everyone for there help.

and best of luck to everyone with this issue.  I know your pain.

Kind regards,

Neil

hi guys

               once again i m reminding you that uninstall mcafee and ur laptopn will get rid of the sound and laptop freezing issue. it is nothing to do with RAID driver or processor cores. so stop worrying and uninstall mcafee. and thank me to put an end to ur pain. DELL is not interested in solving the issues of the customers. they have send me the wifi that didnt make any difference. thats y i worked and found the solution after spending a whole day on that.   so try that u will b happy and let me know what u feel after that problem gone.

@waqaas

Appreciate your trying to help people and suggesting that you've found the solution (by increasing the size of your text). Honestly your comments are from the perception of a fish in the pond.... and they dont hold good for the fish in the sea.

You're not the first person to suggest uninstalling McAfee would rid us all of the audio stutter, there's been plenty people suggesting the same. UNFORTUNATELY, THAT'S NOT THE SOLUTION. I'm sure you've not done your homework. If you run a google/youtube/dell forums search for the issue - and then really bother to read through them you'd figure that UNINSTALLING MCAFEE is not the solution!!!!

Bought my L702x in June 2011, problem existed since the purchase and got worse over time.... I uninstalled McAfee for 2 reasons 1> it's crap and 2> people suggested that the audio stutter/crackle might actually go away on doing so. NO IT DINT. I've tried plenty of fixes and solutions and here's my feedback which I posted on a similar forum on the 12NOV2011 -

Issue also seen on L702X running Windows 7 (bought 19/06/2011).

Symptoms -

Choppy/Distorted/Stuttering Audio since Day 1. Gets unbearable at times. More pronounced when listening from earphones/headphones (more detail).

Observed during <1> listening to songs - winamp/mediamonkey/iTunes etc., <2>watching video - VLC, <3>streaming audio/video from web - Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, <4> Opening web browser while listening to music. <5> Skype/Voovoo voice/video calls. <6> Gaming. To sum up, seen everywhere.

Mentioned it to the tech support, they said might be corrupt mp3, wtc. Which I know it isn't.

Attempts -

Tried Audio, Video (both Intel and nVidia),entire System (Windows 7) reinstalls. Nothing helped. Tried DPC Latency, seen a lot of red spikes.

Uninstalled nvidia drivers, no more McAfee, problem still exists. Someone mentioned Windows 7 not recognising all cores of a multi core proccessor, checked that too.

On google, there's plenty of results for keyword search - xps 17 audio stutter/distorted, etc. and there's a good amount of feedback on Dell Forums as well.

Also have Ubuntu 11.10 installed on my system, I don't remember seeing any stutters in there.

Ron

L702X

Intel i7 2720QM

6GB RAM

nVidia GT555M

by the way mcafee works well unless its program is updated

@raunak_I

well thanks for ur comment but u know one thing before saying me anything go check whether u r having the same problem . i didnt read any forum nd i worked that out myself. and go update all ur system drivers from dell website, update ur bios to A14. update creative sound blaster as well. reset bios settings pressing "F2"

basically that weird sound was coming wen u r connected to internet via wifi and playing a sound even from hard disk. and that sound issue happns after some time. to check its gone or not do all wht i said and also play a sound from ur hard disk and try to copy a large size files from any of ur your network computer as my internet download speed is 50 Mb/s i figured that issue out by downloading and copying files from internet and my network computer as well.

and after uninstalling mcafee and doing all above, there is no  cracking sound. and if u dont wanna admit i cant help. my purpose of posting was just helping others. and READ the comments of "neil" on previous page under my thread before saying anything to me. first go and see whats the problem with ur laptop.   reply is appreciated.

hello,

I'd like to clarify the pop of the speaker right before palying a sound on the laptop,

that's completely normal!

in the dell new technology, trying to save as much battery power as possible, the sound card is automatically turned off after 15minutes if no sounds are played,

so just when a sound starts that pop means that the sound card is on again. I hope that is clear for you now.

Yes I did have a popping speaker before.

It doesn't pop anymore, at all. I didn't have the most up to date driver installed. 

I went to the realtek website and installed the driver.

Which was odd considering dell normally wants to provide the drivers and does not allow that. (FYI, I also download the most up to date drivers for the Nvidia video card from Nvidia's website too)

Anyway, installed the driver, no more speaker pop. You may want to do the same.

i had the same problem all i did was completely remove Mcavee and installed Microsoft security esentals in its place and problem gone.

I an also not able to solve the problem. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!