bombalooza

hi

for some weeks now i find that my laptop is making crackling noises from the speakers when i try to play some music or video. it is the most annoying as my laptop serves as my primary source for music and watching movies and so on. especially when i want to show someone something on youtube the crackling shows up in full swing annoying the hell out of me.

-tried headphones thinking it may be the laptop speakers. no use. sound from the headphones is crackling too.

-tried reinstalling drivers and also downloading the latest ac '97. hasnt really helped.

-tried getting the latest codecs, flash updates and what not. no use.

-only thing that seems to work...restarting the laptop. for some hours the audio is good, without any skipping or crackling. but then later it comes back especially with any flash based videos that i watch like youtube.

i working off a sony sr series laptop still in warranty but sony folks take atleast 3 weeks to fix things and i cant afford to live without a laptop that long. HELP!!!

bombalooza

btw i forgot to add something that might help diagnose the issue. it seemed like the problem started after a particular round of windows automatic updates. i tried reverting back to system settings a month and over ago but to no avail...

thanks

Pauldo

Probably is not the culprit but what are your temps?

You can try Speedfan, link is in my sig, but know that it can throw wrong values from time to time. Just double check with the values reported in your BIOS.

What did you mean by reverting back to system settings? Did you mean Windows Restore?

If you are pretty sure that this started up after an update than I would reformat and reinstall Vista. Unfortunately, Vista doesn't have a repair feature like XP does.

One thing that you can try, before you do anything too drastic, is to create a LiveCD of Linux and run that to see if you have the same issues. If there is crackling when in Linux than it is more than likely a hardware issue, if not than it's your OS.

If you are unfamiliar with a LiveCD, basically you burn an iso image to a CD and than boot to your CD drive and you have a working copy of Linux up and running without touching your Vista installation. Once you are done testing, you remove the CD, reboot and you go back to your original OS.

There are many flavors of Linux out there, my favorite right now is Ubuntu. Here is their download page with instructions on how to do it.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

Let us know how it goes.

Pauldo

bombalooza

thanks for your suggestion.

may be you are right that it could be a fan issue. because the problem starts only a couple of hours after the computer has been running.

and yes what i did was a system restore to a point where i thought the updates hadnt been applied yet.

i am going to try the livecd approach with linux. but reinstalling vista is way too drastic as i have a manufacturer's installation and dont even have an install cd. plus all the data and settings will be lost which will mean a lot of hard work getting everything up again.

Pauldo

That's what I was thinking but the laptop should still be quite hot after a restart if that was the case and you should only get a brief moment where things are better.

Where you able to see what your temps were. I'd be curious to see what it was.

Pauldo