First thing to check is if there is any CPU throttling set in the bios. It goes by different names, depending on motherboard...aka..."Cool n Quiet". Disable it to test. Throttling could also be happening if you are running preloaded software from the manufacturer at Windows start. Check the system tray for something like that, if it exists.
Check for DPC Latency (google it, it will point you to dpclat.exe utility, use it to measure your system's DPC latency). I suspect it's DPC latency problem...
zzz2496
first of all, thanks for all the replies...really appreciate it
I have tried out everything, but nothing seems to work
I'm going to roll back my video driver, but the thing is I was told - here on sevenforums - to update that driver after a recent BSOD
so in a way I hope the crackling remains even after the rollback, otherwise I have to choose between "something that might be music" or an unstable pc
How far back did you go?
I had to take mine back into the 160 series (they're currently at 190 something) to get one that would work... Nvidia admits they're having some driver problems of late and have older versions available on their website... but don't just go back a week or two... go back at least a couple of months...
Also... if your driver is installing that silly 3D video muppingsnarf (PhysX) you might like the results of uninstalling it... It can be removed separately in control panel.
I ran dpclat.exe and it showed some drivers might cause audio drop-outs
I'm going to disable some of them one at a time and see how it goes
hope this was the golden tip
It's not the golden tip, though I hope that it is...
By using dpclat.exe, you can narrow down the culprit... Most of the time, it's network controller driver that's sharing IRQ with some high performance device (another network controller or a display card) OR network controller sharing IRQ with your sound card...
zzz2496
Edit: maybe you can try this: use "Wave" as your audio output device under your music/mp3 player. I previously use DirectSound in iTunes and it crackles like mad when I scroll up/down in Firefox, moving the output to Wave seem to fix the problem.
I'm sorry that it took me this long to find out that my wireless internet adapter is indeed the culprit
I just wasn't patient enough before while testing the different drivers
now do I have to delete and reinstall the driver, or is there more to it?
I just wanted to say Thank God I found this thread. I spent nearly 10 hours uninstalling and installing different drivers for different things before figuring out what it was thanks to dpclat.exe. A program I use to identify hardware called siw.exe was what was causing it for me.
Thanks guys!
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