e6500 crackling audio

I think that it's a problem that they are aware of. I emailed Dell Small Business Tech support yesterday. They told me to install the Intel Matrix Manager, A05. I did and it improved, but did not fix the situation. I then installed the A02 version and everything is running much better - no static in my audio and my trackpad never gets stuck any more. On my configuration, this has been an acceptable resolution.

 

Good to hear that it may, given a little attention, be fixable. I don't want a new laptop that I've got to spend a lot of time troubleshooting out of the box, but I suppose that if this is the worst thing about the E6500, I think it'll be a good choice for me.

 

Just to update and report back on my own post.

10 days after reverting all 22 E6500's back to the Intel Matrix (Dell 8.2) drivers, no further complaints on audio issues.

 

I decided to revert back to this driver to see if I would have any changes. I have to say that there was a dramatic improvement over the latest driver, but with my modular bay turned back on my problems returned, but only about every two and a half minutes. However, when it did strike it was a major stumble...not just a crackle. So, I turned the modular bay back off and everything is happy again. I'm going to stay with the A02 driver anyway though, since it clearly made an improvement. What's odd though is that I had this driver before with all kinds of problems/ That's what I can't figure out...

But thanks for suggesting going back!

 

The 1001 driver is labelled as A03 in Canada, and I rolled back to that.

With the 1007 driver, I was getting constant latency of over 10000 microseconds, now I'm hovering around 500 microseconds. Every now and then I get a spike of 800 or so microseconds, but the only thing that triggers the red is removing and inserting the optical drive (not ejecting, removing) or switching on and off the Wi-fi. Left alone and everything is fine.

I got a spike on the 1007 drivers of 163000 microseconds when I reinserted the optical drive. Yikes.

Greg

 

hi, I can't help myself and I am so today so I thought I could share with all asking here about crackling noises...I cleared the booting up noises crackling noises in the laptop I adopted from my nephew by manually updating the Microsoft DirectX installation. Good Luck and may God Bless you...

New Zealand

 

Here's a data point that might be of interest: Last night I did a test install of Win7 Beta on my M6400, installing the same software and drivers (Intel Matrix manager, etc., etc.) as on the regular Vista install. I re-ran the Latency Checker and guess what: Everything is in the green, and remains in the green, whereas I had nice, regular double or triple red spikes in 10-s intervals under Vista.

My Conclusion: It's not the hardware nor the drivers, the problem is Vista, at least on this particular machine. Now if only Windows 7 was released...

 

It is been posted on the board before that DPC Latency results are better in XP than Vista so OS does make a difference.

 

Well, I had tested my old M60 last week, and that also showed nasty high-latency spikes. Not as bad nor as frequent as the ones I had seen on Vista-based machines, but spikes nevertheless. In contrast, Windows 7 did not have any such spikes at all, the latency remained almost constant at maybe 300-400microseconds, all the time.

 

Oh, that's why my results seemed so good after I changed to the 8.2.2.1001 drivers. It's Windows 7.

Greg