Dell 1525 problems with sound and Win XP

Greetings,

recently I downgraded from Vista to XP. Went to the Dell Support website, dowloaded all the correct drivers.

After installing XP and all the drivers, everything is working fine except one thing:

When the wireless card (Dell Wireless 1395 with Broadcom chipset) is activated, every audio source (Winamp, Youtube videos, etc...) that I play stutters/crackles every few seconds.

I think it's a driver problem because this didn't happen on Vista.

Has anybody has had the same problem?

Thx!

PS: Running Windows XP SP3

 

I installed xp on my 1525 also and everything is working as it should with no problems. Which sound and wireless drivers did you use?

 

Using:

Dell Wireless Multi-Device WLAN driver version A17

and Sigmatel STAC 92XX C-Major HD driver version A00

All of these were avaiable on the Dell 1525 area for Windows XP drivers on support.dell.com

This is probably not a hardware issue because it worked perfectly on Vista SP1 or Ubuntu 8.04.

 

I used the drivers from the 1520 for both wireless and sound. Maybe give that a try?

 

Exactly the same problem here! Bought a 1525 last month, downgraded to XP and used dells support site to get all the XP drivers.

All sound has a crackling/popping sound every so often, which although not that bad it does get very annoying when your watching a movie and concentrate on it !

Using drivers:

Dell - Driver
Applies to:
Wireless 1490 Dual-Band WLAN MiniCard
Wireless 1395 WLAN MiniCard
Wireless 1505 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card
Wireless 1390 WLAN MiniCard

SIGMATEL - Driver
Applies to:
STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio

I have tried reinstalling these many times to try and solve it.


Also my trackpad goes weird sometimes, where it will not move properly and I have to rub it or tap it to get it to function normally again.

NOTE: everything was fine in Vista, so it must be an XP driver issue.

 

Hei, guys.
There's a link on a Dell forum about this issue, it appears the wireless card is the culprit. Try to disable it (either just Fn+F2) or from the Hardware manager, give it a minute and see if the sound crackles disappear. If they do, it is indeed the wireless. You may alternatively check with this DCP latency checker http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml if you get sparse red spikes, which means a component from your current config. does not allow for real time audio/video streaming. People who use this laptop for music production should be aware of the problem!
This is the Dell Forum link: http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=cc_faq&thread.id=364
Good luck, report back if it worked.

AchternStyg

 

Hei, guys. I am back with some more info on my new Dell Inspiron 1525.

The conclusion (if you wanna skip reading the rest of this message) is NOT TO GET AN INSPIRON 1525 for music production.

I have tried both Vista and XP SP2 or SP3. The problem is that the DCP latencies are not low enough to run a ASIO driver with low enough latency for real time midi playing. Namely, using DPC latency checker tool, in Vista the average latencies are around 500 micro-seconds, where as in XP they are around 190 micro-seconds, which is not too bad. ( My older Inspiron 6400 , XP SP2, stays flat at 40-50 microseconds). THE actual problem is that every now and then, there are red spikes and yellow spikes on top of the smooth green background. The red spikes I managed to trace back to the wireless card, a crappy Dell 1395 WLAN MiniCard. When I disable the card (from the Device Manager, or rightclick on the wireless icon in the right hand of the taskbar->Disable) , the red spikes go away. Nevertheless, the yellow spikes, as big as 1-2 ms, come about 2-3 every 30 seconds and spoil my attempts to run at latencies as low as 64-128 buffersize , equivalent to a total of 5-7 ms at 96000kHz. This is a pitty, as this laptop seems otherwise quite promising. I could not find any culprit for these yellow spikes, I tried to disable most of the components, turned off a lot of windows services, etc.
One can also hear pops when playing an mp3 in winamp, completely correlated to spikes seen in the DPC checker.

Hope this helps. I am trying either to get a refund on my 2 day old machine, have my motherboard changed or otherwise pray for a quick release of a new BIOS version, if they track down and fix the problem. Dell Tech support has been informed.

Achtern Styg

 

Hi Achtern Styg,

I'm currently trying to get the same issue sorted on a Vostro 1310 (with XP/SP3), which has a 1395 card as well. I made the following observations:

- If I disable the WLAN card in the BIOS, the DPC latency drops to acceptable ~100µs, while disabling the card via the switch plus unloading/disabling the "Dell Wireless WLAN Tray Service" via services.msc (or just removing the whole driver) doesn't have any impact on the basic latency. The enormous spikes disappear though. This tells me almost certainly that this is a BIOS based issue and not the usual bad driver running amok on the CPU thing. Similar to the desaster Gigabyte experienced with some mainboards recently...

- I have the same thing with remaining smaller spikes every 30s and traced that down to the Windows Management Instrumentation Service (WINMGMT.exe). If I disable this service, the spikes disappear but alas this service is essential and certainly not the real cause of the issue.

Then I decided to do some "system hardening" and closed port 135 via DCOMCNFG.exe and disabled "NetBIOS via TCP/IP" in the network properties for the installed adaptors (only WLAN on my Vostro) and somehow this removed the "yellow spikes" too!

Maybe this helps you to get your Inspiron running better with ASIO too?

Edit:

Whatever I do, there are yellow spikes remaining, they just show up less frequently (every 180s) and cause a click when running ASIO apps...

 

Hello People!

I bought a Dell inspiron 1525 last week and Im having the same problem when using traktor scratch, ableton or a simple mp3 on winamp using vista.
But if I disable the WLAN it works great, traktor scratch and ableton run without drop outs or glitchs.

I dont mind to have to disable WLAN when Im working on this kind of programs, but it happens with a simple mp3 on winamp So I cant surf on the net while listen to music

I Hope Dell fixes this driver thing, theres so many people with the same problem


By the way, I try to do what this link http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=cc_faq&thread.id=364 say but my advanced tab looks different and I cant figure it out. Anyone?

Thanks

 

It happened to me also. i just want to share what i did to correct the problem. Dell 1525 wireless LAN minicard driver (R174291) download is okay. Basically, when you unzip this file, a folder is created in your drive c:..Go to Add/remove programs and remove the installed application from there. Reboot your pc, when the wireless card is detected and ask for driver, just browse the driver folder at drive c:dell/driver and it will be okay.

 

Hi All - just posted this on another Thread, as I was having the same issue - hope this helps.

Hi All,

Like everyone else on this thread, I'm running a 1525 notebook with a firewire card (M-Audio Profire 610). I was running into the same issues noted here using DPC latency checker. I was also receiving the same spikes, but at 15 second intervals. This was causing my Cubase Essential 4 to have major issues - I'd have to reboot Cubase every 10 minutes or so.

I did two things that fixed the issue:
1. I purchased an expresscard firewire card with a Texas Instrument chipset. The one I picked up was from StarTech.com
2. I disabled the Ricoh firewire controller

Problem solved! No more spikes and I have no latency issues.

It seems that the soundcard manufacturers tend to test their drivers on Texas Instrument chipsets (cause that's what Apples use). Changing out the onboard firewire for an add-on card with a TI Chipset solves the issue - but make sure it is a TI Chipset - it is worth paying the extra 10 bucks here...