Vista - Sound crackles and Lags

Hello there!

Well, after three days of testing and trying, I'm pretty much out of ideas. So if anyone has some more, fell free to throw it in here.

Since, as I said, three days ago all soundoutput (so no matter if it's coming from Raltek onboard, Creative card or USB-Headset) gives me a very nasty crackling noise, almost throughout the whole time. Along with those crackles, there are lags. Meaning that if I play and XviD (or any other kind of) movie, the video will lag when a crackle can be heard. But of course this also happens when it's only sound, like an mp3 or a wav.

Exactly how and when this occured, I don't even know. The day before I realised it, I didn't even use anything that would require sound output. Also it had to change over night, literally, Because my computer wasn't shutdown during the night.

Not only that it doesn't matter what output device I use, also the application making the sound isn't relevant. It happens in Winamp, WMP, VLC, games.. Even Youtube.

After playing around with all the drivers, right now I'm on the stock Vista x64 driver for the Realtek. The Creative card is next to me on my desk, rather than inside the PC, but that didn't help either, obviously. The sound on my USB headset is the same.

Naturally I already reformatted and made a fresh new installation of Vista. But it's the same difference. Running a Ubuntu-Live-CD, however, gave me a moderatly big suprise: no crackles or lags at all. While I was the whole time thinking it's a hardware fault, this Linux situation gives me trouble ruling out which part of my hardware could be causing the trouble.

At the moment I narrowed it down to either the CPU (Intel DualCore), the mainboard (a Gigabyte with Intel P35 chipset) or the RAM (4GB DDR2 by Infineon).


Anyone? :|

I recently had the same problem, It occured when I downloaded the optional updates for my soundcard (X-FI Extreme) via the windows update...

Had to roll back the drivers and all is fine now.

Maybe the same prob as yourself...