VeeshanVault

Friend has a laptop that they recently reinstalled everything on from scratch (OS, drivers, etc). They're currently experiencing a problem I've had in the past myself on desktop PCs in that everytime the hard drive is accessed it makes the sound skip. So if there's MP3s playing and the drive is writing, the sound is horrid.

I've checked to make sure they're using the most current audio drivers, set the audio performance from max to min, turned off/on the HDD cache, optimized the drive.. I don't know what else could affect it.

Has anyone ever encountered this and found a solution short of buying a non-integrated sound card?

Thanks in advance

Reinstalled from the "restore CD" or?

Thinking perhaps they're missing some IDE drivers that handle the DMA/caching?

Reinstalled from a XP install CD (not the restore thing). I checked the IDE drivers and the DMA/PIO options are there. I don't think I messed with them however.

But we did grab all the most recent drivers from the MFG web site and got them installed.

Try playing an audio CD instead of an MP3 and see if the problem still persists. Since playing CD audio doesn't require the processing power that an MP3 requires, you might be able to eliminate sound card drivers as the problem.

What are the specs on the laptop? It could be as simple as the CPU being hogged by I/O operations (e.g. too little memory causing a lot of swapping) therefore the MP3 player is blocked on the CPU.

Without knowing too much about the specifics, thats the best I can think of..

It's a Sony PCG-FXA49 Vaio 1.2 GHz

I've had them try MP3's and audio cd's both. The sound issue happens on both. I've also had them try WinAmp and WMP players. I've tried increasing the buffer in WinAmp as well. I checked the IRQs and it looks like the only thing it's sharing the sound with is the printer and USB (neither of which are in use during testing). You can literally look at the hard drive light come on and hear the skip at the same moment.

I've encountered this same issue on well equipped desktop PC's also, which is usually why the first thing I do is disable the onboard sound and get a $20 SBlive. Unfortunately that's not an option here.

If your using the base windows XP drivers I'd definatly go and find some specific to your system, especially chipset drivers.

Siji wrote:It's a Sony PCG-FXA49 Vaio 1.2 GHz

Sony are pricks for not releasing drivers for their laptops.. makes install from anything other than the restore CD impossible if you want 100% functionality.

I'd try really hard to dig up the restore CD, or failing that, install Linux on it