Laptop, scratchy sound.

[Deleted User]

I was just reading the forum that I linked to before for the Windows 7 driver. It seems that somebody fixed this problem by disabling power management for the sound card. Go to the new control panel with the equalizer and look around for the power management option (on my computer, it is under preferences/settings/general).

roadster1

tentonine wrote: »

I was just reading the forum that I linked to before for the Windows 7 driver. It seems that somebody fixed this problem by disabling power management for the sound card. Go to the new control panel with the equalizer and look around for the power management option (on my computer, it is under preferences/settings/general).

Just tried that but no change.

The Dell BIOS flash utility doesn't work......so I'm just off to bang my head against the wall!

[Deleted User]

Did you get the Windows Vista version of the BIOS flash and not the Windows XP version? Have you tried running it with administrator privileges? You can also get a DOS version and boot from a USB stick.

Did you install Dell Control Point/Access Direct? This may have enabled power management settings that could be causing a problem.

One other thing - have you checked to ensure that you have definitely set the computer to use stereo speakers and not some kind of surround sound? There is an option for this in the new sound control panel (and possibly also if you click the configure button in the standard Windows 7 sound control panel).

roadster1

BIOS now updated. Ran the program in compatability mode. It rebooted then installed the MS High Definition Audio device drivers! You can imagine, my heart in my mouth, played audio track and............still the same! Argghhhhh!

I'll go back and install the IDT drivers but I'm not holding out any hope...

debitcardmayhem

Just an idea (useless again probably ) ok you downloaded the dell driver earlier (vista one) did it give you something like C:\DELL\DRIVERS\R171788 which you then have to run to install after extracting . So try right click on it and properties compatibility and set it to be Vista 32. See what happens.
......Told you it was a useless idea

roadster1

Its the same on any driver. I've tried 3.

Just noticed that the screen saver does a wobble on the same frequency as the sound glitch. It's the rotating text one and it hesitates twice each rotation. No other display problems though so probably unconnected. Plays a film fine.

[Deleted User]

Did you always uninstall the previous driver before trying a new one? Also - do you know if this problem was there as soon as you installed Windows 7 or did you install drivers/other software straight away without using the initial installation for long enough to notice?

roadster1

Yes, always uninstalled.........
Not sure about the second part of your question. Are you leading up to a re-install of W7??

[Deleted User]

If you are not certain that the problem was there when you first installed Windows 7, then a clean install could be a good idea. So that you don't waste your time if it doesn't work, you could install Windows 7 again on a different partition so that you can just go back to the current one if it doesn't make any difference. If you don't have a second partition at the moment, you can create one with this free software:
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-express/

If you have both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 disks, you could try using the other version to see if that makes any difference.

debitcardmayhem

Found another post elsewhere saying use XP SP3 mode on the Dell Driver executable ? Worth deleting driver and trying that too your call