Skipping problem with WMP 11 on Vista

Recently purchased Dell E1505 with Vista. Copied over all my WMA files from my old Sony Vaio running XP - they worked fine on that machine. But when played on WMP 11 on the Dell, every file skips (stutters, is garbled) at least once, for 3 to 5 seconds at at a time. It's a sound as though the CPU is too busy with another task to give the music enough cycles - but I'm often not doing anything else.

Any ideas or fixes? I've searched Microsoft KB to no avail.
Many thanks!

Dell Inspiron E1505, Vista, 2GB RAM, 120GB HD, ATI X1400

 

Did you install the audio driver from Dell for your model?

 

No. I've just gone with Vista the way it was configured at purchase. Do you think I should install a new audio driver?

 

OK. It should've already come with the Dell driver installed. Did you clean up all the bloatware Dell preinstalls? You probably have all kinds of unnecessary stuff running in the background.

 

Thank you for the tip on audio driver. I'd checked the Dell support site and seen that the latest audio driver was from 1/29/07. My unit shipped on 2/28/07 so I assumed that it would have the driver from a month ago. But your post made me wonder. So I checked the installed driver and found it was from 11/29/06! Isn't anybody thinking over there??? I downloaded the latest driver and it is better. It can still skip when I do another task, but isn't skipping when there's just music.

I uninstalled all the bloatware I knew didn't want. Next I guess I should take a look at Startup & the processes running.

Thanks for the help - let me know if any other thoughts.

 

Glad to help out some. You might want to take a look in Process Explorer while playing your song files to see what's causing the skipping.

 

try it on another media player, such as media player classic, vlc or winamp.

if its the same then its a general issue

do u have nero 7 installed? i had this problem when i installed nero 7, theres a service it uses and keeps coming on now and then when u access a media file. It can be disabled but i cudnt find how so i removed nero 7 altogether.

 

What wireless card do you have?

I have the Dell 1500 Draft-N card. I've been having occasional static and skipping in audio playback (Itunes, foobar, W's Media Center). I've been reading that the wireless card still has some driver issues that cause this interference. It's almost bad enough to get me to go back to XP, but I'm going to hold out for another couple of weeks and see if they get a new driver out.

I noticed that dell is currently not offering this wireless card as an option. I wonder if this is because of the driver issue?

 

Some updates on my situation:
I've been running Process Explorer - very interesting. When the music starts to skip, CPU usage jumps to 45-50%. But I can't see anything suspicious taking those cycles. The most CPU use at that time seems to be by Microsoft processes, eg, WinPrvSE.exe under srvchost.exe. But there is definitely a clear correlation between skipping and high CPU usage, which happens every 3 or 4 minutes.

I haven't tried another media player yet but will try Winamp later today.

My wireless card is the Intel Pro Wireless 3945.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

 

OK, latest update. Spoke to a Dell tech rep who said this is a known problem that should be fixed with a future update to WMP 11. She said if I could uninstall WMP 11, I could install v10 and it should be fine. But because WMP is part of the OS, I can't uninstall it. (Price of what's considered progress.) So her solution was to install Winamp. I did, it works fine. The curious thing is that CPU usage on Process Explorer no longer jumps to 40-50%. Hmm.

I'll consider this an adequate workaround until the WMP update. Thanks to all of you who offered help. Since the manufacturers have largely abandoned users, it's incredibly helpful that a community like this exists.

 

This problem is also on my Sony SZ43G/N.

Is like a laggy problem right?

 

this post helped me allot, I don't have a dell but when I use wmp my cpu usage also jumps to 45-50% slowing everything down. Hopefully it will be fixed in the next wmp update. You would think having two gigs of ram you wouldn't have this problem.

 

Final update. Dell tech was wrong. It's not a WMP 11 problem. Found this in a Microsoft WMP newsgroup and it fixed my problem:

I had the same problem when I played songs that were stored on my hard
drive; the skipping did not occur when I played a cd. I found the following
answer, which worked for me, on Dell's support site. 1. Click Start, and
type sound. 2. Click sound. The Sound Window appears. 3. Click
speakers/headphones and then properties. The properties window appears. 4. Click the enhancements tab. 5. Click to check the Disable all
enhancements checkbox. 6. Click apply and then OK. The properties
window closes. 7. Click Apply and then OK. The sound window closes.

 

This is a great thread.

Ironically, I had the opposite problem. Same garble or skipping, but ...
it happened when I used the laptop CD/DVD drive in WMP 11.

Music CD, it played garble
DVD, picture fine, audio garble

Movies or Music stored on my HD? Played fine.

Spent an hour screwing around with all the audio settings, configurations, SB Audigy settings, etc. Tried other software players, still garbled. That pointed me to Hardware.

Went to Dell driver download page ... saw a Phillips CD/DVD download marked "urgent".

Downloaded it, it was actually firmware. GARBLE / SKIPPING gone !

Good info, glad you found your solution, and shared.