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July 22nd, 2022 08:00
Dell Laptop - Audio issues, a possible solution....
Latitude 5480/5488
This is more of a note rather than a request for help. I had bought two Dell laptops, and this Latitude 5480 was the 2nd and both laptops were terrible at audio - due to high DPC latency, related to things like Dell's ACPI.sys issue.
Audio on another suppliers laptop was perfect, no audio glitches whatsoever.
Then I ran into some information on the RME support forums, and eventually put together the following steps, which seemed to have improved the situation a whole lot, even though I still have High DPC latencies reported by Latency Mon.
If you want the whole spiel, look in here :
https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1384919-dell-laptops-audio-glitches-dpc-latency-potential-solution.html
The main changes I made are these.
Analysis revealed high DPC Latency, using Latency Mon tool. With cause being the ACPI.sys. driver.
It's impossible to determine exactly which one of these things improved the experience, but here is my list of things I recall changing.
1. The laptop has 16GB RAM, which is typically never utilised beyond 55% so I decided to turn off the caching, completely, so everything runs in RAM, no swapping.
2. Processor Scheduling - Adjust for best performance of - Background Services. This used to be one of the traditional optimisation steps, in the old days, before Windows 7, which some say is no longer needed, but when you have issues, you try everything. I am certain this change should not make things worse.
3. Use High Performance power profile.
a. Turn off any idling by changing the Turn off Display and Put the Computer to Sleep - to Never, in both cases. This is a laptop purposed for audio workstation duties, so for serious work, keep everything running, as much as possible - switched on.
b. Set all "turn off Hard disk" to never. need to type in the word "never" in these parameters. Why? Not needed in this case, cos I'm using an SSD, which does not spin, and therefore no energy is lost by keeping this setting to on.
c. Wireless Adapter Settings - set everything to "Maximum Performance"
d. Sleep after to "never", allow hybrid sleep to "off", Hibernate after to "never",.
e. USB Settings, USB Selective Suspend settings to - "Disabled".
f. Intel Graphics to "Maximum Performance".
g. Processor Power Management - turn everything to 100%, or Active.
Remember to save the changes.
4. Now this next step was the big tip from the RME forum. Which was turning off the C-states in the BIOS. Kept Turbo on.
5. I also turned off Bluetooth, in the BIOS, since I never use bluetooth.
6. This was also new to me. Discovered that Windows fast restart does not fully restart the computer whenever I shut down, so a restart does not really restart everything. So I turned Fast Restart off - on an SSD, there is no real difference in startup times, so no advantage in turning on Fast Restart.
7. Yes - turned off all system sounds.
Having suffered from this issue for well over 5 years, across two laptops from Dell, it would be wonderful if this fixes the problem.