I posted earlier that I was having trouble with my sons sound card, but now
I think it is something else, because when the sound is making the garbled,
breaking up noise, the mouse cursor stops, videos hang for a split second,
programs hang ever so slightly.
A few things I would suspect.
The first would be an antivirus conflict (particularly if it is a slower
machine or light on RAM). Try disabling the active file monitoring piece
of your antivirus software and see if the problem goes away. If it does,
you will need to either contact the AV vendor and tell them you have a
conflict problem or find an AV which is lighter on resources.
The second would be a video card conflict. Are you running the latest
version of the drivers? I do not know if there is a way to disable the
currently installed driver without uninstalling it. When debugging video
drivers, I usually end up uninstalling and reinstalling more times than I
like.
On thing I would do is to install Process Explorer from Sysinternals.com
and minimize it to the system tray. It will show you a running chart of
the CPU usage. Does the CPU usage spike when you play a sound? If so, you
can open Process Explorer and it will show you the CPU history for every
running application. With this, you may be able to debug which
application(s) are taking CPU cycles when you go to play sounds.
One other thing, when you install drivers, do you do so in a clean boot?
IME, installing drivers while other applications are running frequently
causes corruption. A clean boot
(
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;310353) usually
helps prevent this problem.
Lastly, are your sound card drivers from Windows Update? If so, I
recommend you go to the hardware manufacturer and download and install the
latest drivers from their site. On one of my machines here the sound card
drivers pushed out by windows updates breaks my sound. Only the drivers
from the sound card manufacturer work correctly.
HTH,
mikkl
