XPS 17 L702x Sound stutter with video lag

Here are things that other people with your model reported trying. Sorry for the late response.

"Last sunday, I re-installed my O.S. and installed old drivers that came in a C.D. with my system. I have not updated my O.S. or my drivers and the system is running fine since then. No issues." posted by jamy

"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." posted by jamy

"-Open Start Menu

-Within the search box type "msconfig"

-Select the Boot tab

-Select advanced options

I will pause to explain something. My L702x has the i7-2820QM 2.3 GHz processor. So therefore when I would check the box "number of processors" you can access a list of the processors the computer recognizes mine would be "8". This noise issue was occuring and I found that when it was my computer only recognized "2". Losing 6 of the cores. Regardless....

-Uncheck "Number of Processors"

-Uncheck "Maximum Memory"

-Click OK

-Click Apply

-Restart your L702x.

-Once the computer comes back on right click on the taskbar and select "Start Task Manager"

-Select the Performance Tab. Look at the CPU Usage History date on the top graph. I have 8 graphs representing all 8 of my Cores on my processor. However many cores you have should be listed too." -- posted by AJ5K

"After reading these posts about the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver I uninstalled it. That was around Dec. 10, and so far I haven't had any "lag" issues since then." -- posted by AJ5K

"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.

I'm not a 100% sure which solution fixed it but it works thank god!!!" -- posted by neil XPS 17 l702x

"hi guys, once again i m reminding you that uninstall mcafee and ur laptopn will get rid of the sound and laptop freezing issue." -- posted by Waqaas

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

"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." -- posted by AJ5K

"Just to throw some light on this issue. People who still have mcafee installed on the computer. Could you please disable netgaurd under Mcafee and check if you still have stuttering issue. It will be under firewall." -- posted by DELL-Anish V

To disable Net Guard:

1) Open McAfee Security Center

2) Click on "Web and Email Protection"

3) Click on "Firewall"

4) Click "Net Guard"

5) Uncheck the box beside "Turn on Net Guard

"Uninstalled McAfee this morning and that cured the problem. No more latency spikes.

Reinstalled all my programs I had dissabled to pinpoint the problem and the problem came back. I started disabling my programs again and found out that my passport external hardrive software was causing it. Although the drive was not connected and the Western Digital backup software was turned of, it was still running in the background causing problems. I dissabled the program in msconfig and my PC has been running like a champ." -- posted by kurtro

"I had a very similar issue with my Dell XPS-17. The computer would lag every once in a while, the mouse became sluggish for a few seconds and the audio would cut out and make weird sounds. I recently realized that this issue completely vanished. The one big change I did to my computer recently was to uninstall McAfee (and use Norton instead)." -- posted by rommyusa

Oh and i recovered my computer back to September of 2011 files, didnt help either

Heres what i have tried so far

~Increased RAM to 8G

~uninstalled McAfee

~Checked Cores, all 4 are working correctly

~Updated Nvidia Driver to 306.10 BETA

~Updated BIOS to A16

~Re-installed programs that use graphics card

~Updated wireless card driver and used Ethernet cord as well (no change in performance)

~turned power usage onto Performance use

~turned primary computer GPU to Nvidia High Performance

i would try ot re-install my OS but my computer didnt come with the OS disk so thats not an option for me unfortunately. i do however have Software and Hardware Warranty, starting to think it could be hardware failure even though the diagostics comes up fine.

i do notice that when the problem occurs, my CPU usage goes to 100% (which has never gone that high until recently, usually caps around 72%-80%) then drops back down to about 2%-5%

ive heard that there might be some problem with the processor from other forums that ive been reading with similar problems, any other suggestions would be nice.

like i said the problem comes and goes randomly, it started at the end of June when my computer completely froze while playing Star Wars The Old Republic.