Personally I believe "hardware limitation" is a misnomer. I believe there are ways to improve the audio with lightfx, but maybe no way to make it 100% perfect under Vista. Vista simply hogs the system more than XP does and there's no getting around that. The crackling sound is due to data starvation in the audio buffer. Vista controls the audio buffer.

So to answer your question, No I haven't seen it with no crackle under vista, but I have seen it improve by various things including updating Quickset, drivers, turning off certain audio features and other things affect it.

Rather than a "hardware limitation" it's more of a "hardware limitation under vista" and IMHO leaving off that last part makes the phrase incorrect. You aren't likely to hear the distortion under XP, and if you do it's because of some driver or something taking up an excessive amount of system resources that affect audio.

 

Here's how I think of it in an analogy. It's like you are driving a pickup with a 2000lb payload capacity. Audio weighs 500lbs LightFx weighs 500lbs. XP weighs 900lbs. Vista weighs 1100lbs. You can have audio, lightfx and xp with no problem, but switch to Vista and you have problems. Maybe the last release of lightfx only weighs 425lbs? :smileyindifferent:

i thank you for your indepth explanation, i just wanted to try and get a feel if that , anyone at all out there is running it with no problems under vista.

 i was thinking of ghosting my c: droping xp on it just to see the results. it woudl be nice if there were a quick release on the hdd so i could pickup a small hdd and leave xp or other os on it and swap them out now n then, but undoing a couple screw's everytime would be a hassel

 

Or you could dual boot between XP and Vista by creating 2 seperate partitons and installing them seperately!

 

You would have thought that they would have picked up on this issue when the Gen2 was in testing!

 

Obviously Dells testing is not thorougher enough and i dont see why Dell has is still shipping them with Vista if its a known issue!

back to my original Question , goes light fx and sound ect.. all work 100 % under  windows xp  on the  xps m1710  ??

 

 

Harbir24_7, I think Dell and (especially) Ms are interested primarily in selling new products just as "any other" company. I have read to many articles and especially diskussions about vista and problems with it, to be convinced that Ms see rather the benefits in having sold their new os, than being certain that it "cooperates" with other software on the Market (and free as well, for that matter...) and make as sure as possible to have other applications run in it.

 

Quite a lot of people both that I know of and that has been writing in forums, have gone "back" to xp. Noone seems to see it as a step backwards...

 

Personally, I think Ms has seen to much to "goodies" that are talked about in vista and planely takes a serious amount of hardware (such as RAM) to work, instead of implement smart features to make it a safe and easy to use and configure os, rather than impementing "goodies" that for plenty of users are simply "show-off".

Upgraded my drive to a 7200rpm 200 gig this weekend and install Vista 64bit Ultimate. The Quickset app can set the LEDs and it understands Media player has the plugin but I have yet to get Media player to make the LEDs act in any fashion. Other than that evrything seems normal.

 

 

Ranger, did you install the Vista version of QuickSet after upgrading?