e6500 crackling audio

You should be...everyone that had their palmrest disassembled/replaced ended up with a palmrest not snapping back in to place correctly or being bent. Keep a good eye on the technician when he's working on your lappy and ask for a replacement if he messes up (on the phone, don't ask the tech guy )

 

The technician should also change the chassis and palm rest, but he didn't do it as there was no sense in doing so.

 

Be glad he didn't!! He probably would've wrecked, as with many others

 

First latency test with Windows 7 driver for the Intel 5100: arrrrrggghh!! I want my Dell 1510 back!!! Red peak every 10 seconds (very regular), often yellow ones in between. With the Dell 1510 I had one or two red peaks every 60 seconds, almost no yellows in between.
I'm going to install the newest driver soon, I'll be back.

Edit: this is strange... I changed bands from a/b/g to b/g .. got worse.. changed back to a/b/g... now I got no red peaks. NO!!! (since two minutes now)
This has NEVER happened during my possession of this notebook, there has always been a some red peaks after a while.
Note that the modular bay / DVD drive is disabled as it produces red peaks all over (Intel Matrix Storage driver issue).
Amazing, no red peak whatsoever.. a few yellow ones sometimes.. man, awesome!! I can't believe it! (I hope this lasts and is not back again when I reboot or something..)

Btw, are there any further tweaks I can change in the Intel 5100 driver details?

Edit 2: I get red very few peaks when I do many things at once like starting Winamp, opening Thunderbird, etc.
Right now I ran a video and simultaneously a song in Winamp .. no red peaks, no crackling!
Now I'm running the same video simultaneously in two different players.. two red peaks at starting, then green and every 5-10 seconds some yellow ones.. no crackling!
I can't believe this.. the issue isn't gone yet, but it seems it's running fine now.. at least better than ever! Intel ftw!

 

Another update from me, the idiot.

I had only tried disabling the DVD drive from the device manager only with no effect. Today I disabled the modular bay (and thus the DVD drive) from the BIOS and my skipping went away.

The bad news is that now I can't use the internal DVD drive without turning it on in the BIOS. The good news is that I have a better and faster external drive that I use for my video conversions and burning and that isn't affected. If I need to use the internal DVD drive when away from my desk (quite rare) I can just turn it on during boot. I don't usually use the sound anyway when I'm away from my desk either.

While it still makes me angry that Dell would allow this problem to exist, at least I can now listen to music without being driven to near insanity.

 

I just installed the older driver for the Intel Matrix Storage Manager and it greatly reduced the latency spikes. Now I am running mostly green with jumps into the yellow, but no red spikes!! And, no skipping in my audio playback!!!

I had previously tried disabling WLAN, LAN, Media Bay, eSATA, and none of these worked. I have now re-enabled all of these devices and everything is running well.

You can get the old 8.2.2.1001, A02 driver here.

I'd still like to see lower latency levels and I know that other drivers still need some work, but I am much happier now.

 

Hmm, you know I realized I never restarted after installing the driver. Once I did, the latency came back. After the next restart I tried force installing the Acer driver, but it wouldnt initialize the card. So I restarted again and installed the HP drivers over the acer drivers.

Now, after two full restarts, oddly enough I only get one initial peak around 20K, it happens on the first I time try to find wireless networks. After that initial ping, latency averages 200us and peaks around 1300us or so.

I also noticed though that the driver options from the Acer drivers sticked. I found that odd. Makes me wonder if the Dell wireless drivers I *thought* I removed (according to Vista I deleted them) still somehow stuck around.

I'll monitor it again in the next few days, but for me this process worked: 1.Install HP drivers (should be 'Broadcom 802.11b/g')2. Restart, install Acer drivers ('Broadcom G') 3. Restart, reinstall HP drivers. 4. Restart once more, check latency.

Edit: After another restart, connect to access point and check latency test, then restart again and test, I don't even get the 20K initial latency peak anymore. If anyone else can recreate what I'm doing, at least then there's a repeatable solution for the 1397 Wireless Card.

 

No worries, we all have our episodes

 

Bi*ching probably won't bring you anywhere. I suggest being nice and friendly. In my case I got the 5100 without knowing at first. But if you tell that this has solved the audio issues for other people on this forum and ask friendly if they can send you one too, why shouldn't they?
Because it really might solve the issue meaning having another pleased customer.

 

Have been putting off my purchase while I watch this thread to see if a practical solution is discovered. For grins and giggles, I called Dell's Business Tech Support to see if there was any fix in the works. The guy (who said he had only been there a few months) said he had not received a single call on the issue of "crackling audio" and wasn't aware of it. Company "line"? Hmmm

I really haven't found much else that "grabs" me. I went back and looked at Studio 15s with similar hardware configurations, and even at the Outlet they weren't that much cheaper than the E6500 when you factor in the warranty. My question about the audio problem is there a sense that it seem like it's some type of device driver, BIOS, or other software issue that Dell eventually get fixed? Or is this one of those nagging problems that will never be truely resolved, and spoil an otherwise nice machine? I know, crystal ball stuff.