Sounds Cracks And Pops

[Deucehearts]

Recently had filled up my hard drive on my Dell E1505 and purchased a new one. On my new hard drive I created 2 partitions. On one partition I loaded an Image of my previous install. On the other partition I did a fresh install of Windows XP Media Center 2005. I then reformated the old harddrive and did a fresh install of Media Center 2005.

Now the issue. On all three partitions I used the drivers supplied on the Dell website for my Laptop and have all windows updates installed. On the imaged partition the sounds works perfectly. On the other partition and other hard drive the sound pops and cracks and chops constantly(intervals of every ~2 secs) for any sound output(cd, dvd, files on computer).

The laptop is almost 2 years old. I am running Media Center 2005 with 1 gb of memory. All partitions have at least 60% of the space free.

I am doing anther fresh install of the old hard as we speak. Any ideas would be great. Thank you for your time.

[Deucehearts]

I was installing driver by driver to figure out when the sound starts going bad and after I installed the Intel Mobile Chipset Driver the sound went bad. How do I uninstall this one? Where is it located in my device manager so I can roll it back?

[shanenin]

I believe it installs multiple drivers, it may be easiest to uninstall it using system restore.

[Deucehearts]

I did a fresh install and first install the modem driver and then the Sigma Tel driver and the sound worked great. I installed the video driver and it was still good. I then installed Ricoh memory card driver and the sound started cracking and popping again. I then did a system restore to a time before I installed any drivers and then reinstalled the modem and sigma tel drivers and the sound issue is still there.

[Deucehearts]

I went to this website and ran the fix in step one and the sound worked fine. I then rebooted and had the same problem again.

I found http://winhlp.com/node/10

UPDATE: I uninstalled the primary IDE channel and restarted the computer and the sound was great for about 10 secs. Then the sound distortion returned.

Edited February 21, 2008 by Deucehearts

[Deucehearts]

I found a fix that has been working for a couple hours now. Apparently the firmware for my TS-L462C 24x cdrw/dvd combo drive conflicts with my sound drivers when updated to DE07. I ended up installing firmware DE05 and the audio now works perfectly fine. I found the fix at the following link.

I will paste the fix from his link as well in case the link goes down for any reason. Fix link.

The solution that I finally found...is to roll back the DE07 firmware to DE05.

Which at first, doesn't seem that easy because the DE05 flashes the firmware from a floppy boot-disk, and my B130 didn't come with a floppy drive.

So here's how I did it ...

1. If you don't already have it, you'll need the DE07 firmware utility that comes with the upgrade.

Get it here .... TS-L462C DE07 firmware

Follow the instruction to download and unzip, but don't install ... we just need the windows flash utility.

2. Download and unzip the DE05 firmware.

Get it here ... TS-L462C DE05 firmware

Write down the location of this folder, as we need the .bin file from this folder.

Mine unzipped to here ... C:\dell\drivers\R114334

3. Now, open(double click) on the DE07 firmware updater called SFDNWIN.exe

and follow the instructions to update ...

a. Click on "Download File Open" button at left corner.

b. Do not click on the DE07_060525.bin, but instead browse to the folder that has the DE05.bin, which in mine is located at C:\dell\drivers\R114334, to select it. Click on "Open".

c. Click on "Start Download" button at middle.

d. Click on "Restart Windows".

e. System will restart after flash is complete.

I hope that this was helpful, and not too confusing, but this worked wonderfully for me!