choppy audio FIX!!!!

Choppy Audio in Win XP

RichardPrince, MD

prince@tricountyeye.com

3/24/2007

 

After months of experiencing choppy audio with my Dell Dimension 8300 computer (1GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive), I have finally reached a satisfactory fix --- thanks to my geeky friend and especially thanks to a fabulous Dell support technician named Jose from Panama City

 

Here is the story: My friend told me that the computer was running too slow and could possibly be fixed by altering the virtual RAM size. This is done by right clicking My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Performance, Settings, Advanced, Virtual memory change, highlight each hard drive and then select the radio button “System manage size.” That’s the first problem fixed in terms of speed of the computer but the audio was still choppy.

 

Next, I called Dell and was lucky enough to get in touch with support tech extraordinaire Jose from Panama City who took me, SUCCESSFULLY, through the following process:

ð       Reboot computer and press F12 key while Dell logo is on

ð       Select boot to Utility Partition

ð       Audio testing revealed: NO AUDIO HEARD! Hint at first bit of problem that the legacy audio card on motherboard was active as well as the Soundblaster card!

ð       Restart computer (next part was to try to trim down the 6+ min boot-up time for my computer!)

ð       Right click My Computer, Manage, Devices, uncheck the + sign Audio and Sound, right click legacy audio and disable it! Close.

ð       Start, Run, “msconfig”

ð       Under General Tab, uncheck system.ini and win.ini and uncheck load startup items

ð       Under Services tab, check HIDE ALL Microsoft Services and check DISABLE ALL

ð       Restart computer; enable remote takeover of computer by Dell technician

ð       Determined that I already had the updated drivers for Creative’s SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 (WDM) version

ð       Ran Creative Agent, selected restore defaults but still no sound and choppy!

ð       Ran Creative Diagnostics and “failed mixed test” and then clicked on “fix”

ð       Put Eagles Hotel California in top CD-ROM drive and it played CHOPPY

ð       Put Eagles Hotel California in bottom CD/DVD+RW drive and it played FINE!

 

So, here’s the solution to the CHOPPY AUDIO: the Secondary IDE Channel had Device 0 set to “PIO” instead of Ultra DMA Mode 2. To fix it, you may need to download a file from www.support.dell.com called “pushdma2.exe” which will force the change from PIO to DMA.

ð       Right click My Computer, Manage, Devices, uncheck the + sign on IDE interfaces, right click Secondary IDE Channel, Properties, Advanced and you will see Device 0 box and Device 1 box

ð       Make sure both have Transfer Mode set to “DMA if available” and Current Transfer Mode set to “Ultra DMA Mode 2” (if that is not an option in the box, then run pushdma2.exe and it will do it for you --- restart computer though!)

ð       Finally, go to Start, Run, msconfig and reverse previous changes by checking the buttons for system.ini, win.ini, load startup items then go to Services and Start Up TABS and pick the ones you need to load. You REALLY don’t need that many of them; every time you download or install software it hijacks your computer and its resources! Uncheck away; if something doesn’t work properly, you can always re-check it!