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xp audio skipping
Ever had an audio CD skip back to the same 1 second of music over and over? My Inspiron 1501 was doing that earlier. It was really bad under Windows Media Player 11. It happened once under Pro Presenter 4 as well. In wmp11, the files were in a set playlist, and in Pro Presenter, they were in the audio bin being played with the media player in the top right of the screen. In both cases, the skipping stopped instantly as soon as either I closed the lid or touched the touch pad.
The laptop is running an OEM version of XP Pro SP3. It was installed with all new drivers about a month ago. Windows has almost all of the optional updates installed, including .net 4 extended and its startup fix.
The only changes I've made in between the time it was running OK and when it began skipping were to change from "no visualtization" to one of the battery visualizations in WMP 11 and swap the CPU from the Turion-yadda TL-58 to a brand new TL 68. I disabled the visualization a few minutes ago and the skipping has stopped for the moment.
I kinda ruled out a software issue by loading up Pro Presenter. Pro is heavy on graphics (it's heavy on everything really, but my system blows away the requirements). With all the drivers nearly new, that rules out outdated drivers. The SSD is allowed to garbage collect (closest SSD equivalent to defrag) almost daily.
The system specs are:
Inspiron 1501
XP Pro SP3
Turion 64 X2 TL-68
4GB (2x2GB) Hynix PC2 6400 memory
64 GB Crucial M4 SSD
Ideas?
Jim Coates
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January 20th, 2012 18:00
The Sigmatel codec is a hardware chip. On the system board of a computer "codec" means that it is built onto the motherboard as opposed to being built onto a card that plugs into the motherboard. It is mainly the ADC and DAC. In a computer with HD audio, the codec is engineered according to the specifications as defined by Intel, which currently means the High Definition protocol.
In my old laptop,Sigmatel has an IRQ (7).
This should not be confused with software "codec" libraries that interpret between different formats.
shadow460
51 Posts
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January 21st, 2012 15:00
Mine lacks an IRQ. Of course it still needs a little bit of hardware to work. The difference here, though, is a simple set of digital to analog converters versus having a full blown audio (slave) processor.
I got the Creative sound card in today. It's a little more sensitive to DPC latency than the SigmaTel thing, but aside from that it absolutely blows the Sigma Tel device away for audio quality. I'm sure if I were to connect via ethernet and disable the wifi, I'd have impressive sound out of this machine with the Creative card installed.
In any case, I've found that the biggest problem is the wifi card causing excessive DPC latency.
I've got several solutions to the audio stuttering problem:
1. Disable the wifi card's drivers through device manager. This can be done by simply right clicking the wireless icon in the system tray and selecting "disable".
2. Install a different wifi card that doesn't have buggy drivers (easier said than done). This may require re writing the system BIOS to whitelist that wifi card, or flashing the card's firmware.
3. Switch operating systems.
Is there a way to assign an IRQ to the sound? If I could assign it a lower IRQ than the wireless, then theoretically the wifi card should experience the dropouts before the audio device does.
shadow460
51 Posts
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January 21st, 2012 17:00
Wait a sec... I found I was running the laptop in the maximum power saving mode. Once I opened it up to maximum performance, the Creative card's skips and pops have all but vanished. It skips a bit with the wifi card on, but both devices (as expected) perform better with the CPU turned up to max. I'll see how it does on the road. I also made a TON of adjustments to the wifi settings. I Googled one of the advanced settings for the dell 1490 wifi card and a list of almost all of them and what they do showed up. The list is on the main Dell site.