Member Avatar for vonnieb

Hi,
I hope someone can help cos I'm about to throw the damn computer out of the window.

My son's computer was prone to a problem with the sound where it would slow right down and then 'gallop' to catch up with its self.

I'd previously managed to solve the problem after following the advice on a tech forum and disabling something in windows.

Unfortunately I've lost the info on what to disable and after his computer developed a fault it had to be totally reformatted by a computer company. All the drivers were re-installed. As before there are no conflicts showing in the device manager so I'm at a loss as how to proceed.
The specs on the computer are:-
Processor:- AMD64 - Athlon X2 4800+
Motherboard:- Asrock AM2NF6G-VSTA
Memory:- 4GB Kingston DDR2 667mhz (4x 1GB)
Hard Drive:- 250GB S-ATA2 3.0Gb/s
Graphics:- NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256MB
PSU:- 400W
CD/DVD: 18x Double Layer DVD+/-RW
Sound:- Realtek ALC888 7.1 channel HD
OS:- Windows XP professional (SP2)

the correct Realtek drivers have been installed. I have tried uninstalling the drivers and letting windows install them upon reboot. Also tried uninstalling the windows HD audio under device manager as per suggestion from another user. All without success.

The sound starts fine but after a few seconds lags behind and then races to catch up as described above.

Any ideas? My son is desperate as he uses this for on line gaming and writing music etc for his band. Help? Anyone?

Vonnie

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Dani AI

Generated

The symptom you describe — audio playing then “slowing down” and suddenly racing to catch up — is most often a driver/latency problem (buffer underruns or long DPC/ISR delays), not a simple RAM limit. raised RAM as a possibility; since the behaviour appeared with smaller memory too, focus first on drivers, power management and buffering.

Try these steps in order to isolate and fix:

  1. Measure latency. Run a DPC/latency tool while playing audio to see if there are regular spikes. If you see big spikes that line up with the stutter, a specific driver is causing long interrupts.
  2. Temporarily disable suspect devices (one at a time): network adapters (wired/wireless), USB controllers, PCI cards and HDMI audio. Re-test after each disable to spot the culprit without uninstalling things permanently.
  3. Turn off CPU frequency scaling in BIOS (Cool’n’Quiet / SpeedStep / C1E). Variable clocking can cause buffer underruns on some older drivers. Also check for a motherboard BIOS update but only apply it after reading the vendor notes and backing up important data.
  4. Update the motherboard chipset/southbridge drivers (not just the audio driver). On many systems the I/O/chipset driver fixes reduce DPC problems.
  5. For music/gaming apps: use a proper low-latency driver (ASIO or ASIO4ALL) and raise the audio buffer/latency in the app until glitches stop. Onboard audio is often less forgiving than a dedicated soundcard.
  6. Quick hardware isolation: try a cheap USB sound adapter or boot a Linux live USB and test audio there. If the problem appears outside Windows, suspect hardware/BIOS/PSU; if it is Windows-only, drivers/settings are to blame.

Cautions: avoid blind BIOS updates, and make a system restore point before driver changes. If the DPC tool points to a specific driver, report that driver name here and further targeted steps can be suggested.

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Member Avatar for vhex

Vonnie,
Windows XP Pro SP2 only supports 2gb of ram. Could it be the sound card is experiancing memory addressing conflicts due to the extra memory?

Member Avatar for vonnieb

Vonnie,
Windows XP Pro SP2 only supports 2gb of ram. Could it be the sound card is experiancing memory addressing conflicts due to the extra memory?

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. Just tried downgrading memory to 2GB but still have the same problem. Come to think of it, when we originally had the problem last time there was only 1gb of RAM installed.

Anyone else got any ideas? I know when I found the cure last time it was really stupidly easy to put right. Pity my brain didn't store the remedy - perhaps I could do with some more RAM too! :)

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