A fix for the choppy audio on my Vostro 1400!

FINALLY! I've spent hours trying to find a fix for the skipping audio problems afflicting so many Vostro and Inspiron owners. All this time I figured it was an issue either with the Core 2 Duo processors in our models, or more likely, an issue with the Sigmatel Audio Driver.

Well, it turns out - for me at least - it's the Dell NVidia driver for the 8400GS.

When I received my Vostro I proceeded to remove Vista and put XP on it. During the XP installation process in which I was following a guide posted on notebookreview (it's a thread called "TOTAL GUIDE: 1420 With XP"), I installed the stock Dell driver for the 8400GS that I downloaded from Dell's driver site.

Everything worked OK, except audio playback. Long story short, after constant headaches with choppy audio and random intermittent clicks and pops for the past two months -- which led to much googling and searching on these forums for a fix to no avail -- today I seem to have stumbled upon a solution, after doing a routine search of the dell community forums:

http://www.dellcommunity.com/suppor...audio&message.id=37215&query.id=152634#M37215

I uninstalled the Dell stock driver and installed the NVIDIA GeForce 8 Mobile series ForceWare Driver v.156.10 for XP found here:

http://www.x-drivers.com/catalog/dr...dia/models/geforce_8_mobile_series/index.html

there's also a Vista version of the same driver, as mentioned in the original dell community forum post linked above

after installing it, i restarted, opened up foobar2000, put on Feist's The Reminder and lo and behold, skip-free audio!

i am really, really happy right now. god, i can't even begin to express how happy i am.

 

I've been reading a lot about this choppy audio problem. Hopefully mine doesn't have this problem.


Probably feels like you just bought a new computer after fixing that, eh? haha

 

totally! i listen to music all the time when i'm on the PC, so the choppy audio problem was really really irritating, seriously.

it got to the point where i was considering shelling out 60-70 dollars for that Creative X-Fi external sound card that some people have used as a workaround

but obviously i didn't want to shell out more money for something that i knew could probably be fixed by a software update of some sort

and it's funny how after hours and hours of poring through every audio problem topic on notebookreview i finally find a fix via a random, cursory search on the dell community forums

but yeah it does feel like i have a new computer now that all that skipping is gone

hopefully this serves as a good fix for others too! if it works, post in here and let us know!

 

Dude!!!!! Totally stoked! Been frustrated with the choppy mp3's for a while. NOTHING i did ever worked! Updated the NVidia drivers you mentioned and finally I can listen to my playlist without annoyance!!

Cheers for the fix! (Inspiron 1420 here)

 

I've got a Dell XPS M1530 with the Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS with the crackily/choppy audio, I've tried changing the video driver twice but have failed both times times. Do I have to delete the original video driver first, and then DL the new one (?) and install it? Or will the screen not work without a video driver?

 

Now that I think about it, this makes a LOT of sense!

When PCI audio was first introduced (Anyone remember the Ensoniq AudioPCI? :laugh , people experienced scratchy audio while playing MP3s and dragging windows or scrolling. This was because a lot of video card drivers would "lock" the PCI bus in order to squeeze out a little performance. This wasn't a problem with the old ISA sound cards.

As a result, video card manufacturers stopped doing this, but maybe Dell has forgotten about this?

I experienced this issue when I first got my Inspiron, but I've since installed the laptopvideo2go drivers, and come to think of it, I haven't experienced the problem since!

Great find!

 

I got the choppiness to disappear by either turning off Powermizer on my old drivers, or installing the exact driver version listed in this thread. There's no option anymore for Powermizer in the new drivers, so either they've removed support for it, or fixed the issue and made the setting mandatory.

 

Will non-dell Display Driver reduce our battery time ? Coz there isn't powermizer.

 

deadsimple, how did you turn the Powermizer off?

 

Awright lets make a list of nvidia drivers that skip. 174.16 and 174.74 definitely DO cause crappy audio.

 

The cause for this choppy audio isn't universal. People have various causes for choppy audio from Wireless A/B bands causing it to Quickset LED settings (for 17" XPS models).

In my case, it turns out that the Quickset LED effects is the culprit (must only have a single, solid light and no effect for the LED lights on XPS laptops).

But it's good to hear about a new solution added to the arsenal of possible solutions to fix choppy audio. I'm amazed at how Dell permits these laptops to be sold with choppy audio problems.