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    Crackling / stuttering audio and video in Inspiron 1520

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by sleepwalk, Aug 23, 2010.

  1. sleepwalk

    sleepwalk Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi, I have an Inspiron 1520 that has begun having crackling and stuttering problems when playing audio and video. It just started a week ago or so. I do a lot of audio recording with an M-Audio Firewire 410 sound card, with Ableton Live. I haven't been able to get any audio files to play with the 410. Well sometimes they'll play for a minute or so, but it's terribly distorted and crackling. So I'll disconnect it and select to play with my onboard audio card (Sigmatel). It plays but it crackles a lot. Same thing when I used ASIO4ALL.

    Even when I simply play audio files on Window Media Player I get the crackling stuttering problem. It occurs whether I am playing files from the hard drive or from a CD.

    Could this be bad RAM ? I've tested the RAM with Memtest86, it showed no errors with one pass through. I'm going to test it again all night tonight while I sleep and see if any errors show up tomorrow.

    I have tried reinstalling drivers, to no avail. I doubted that anyway as it seems unlikely that the Sigmatel and M-Audio drivers would go bad at the same time.

    What else could be causing this ? Bad processor ? RAM ? I don't think it's the hard drive because I get the same problem when playing a CD. Everything was working fine up until about a week ago.

    I have XP Pro SP2, Intel Core 2 Duo T8300, 2.40 GHz, 4 GB Ram, Western Digital 7500BPVT 750 GB hard drive (only used 83 GB so far).

    Thanks-
     
    sleepwalk, Aug 23, 2010
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  2. sleepwalk

    sleepwalk Notebook Enthusiast

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    Well, I let the Memtest86 run overnight. It made 4 passes with no errors. So I guess it's not the RAM. Any ideas ?
     
    sleepwalk, Aug 23, 2010
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