I have recently blogged about how I wanted a new laptop, a
laptop refresh if you will. I finally bought a Dell XPS 15, decently spec’d,
got enough juice to last at least 5 hours and runs graphics and everything very
well. Is a tad heavy but no build issues otherwise. So, I was surprised to find
this laptop have some very awesome sounding laptop speakers, actually the most
awesome speakers that I have seen in a laptop ever! I was very glad that the
laptop had brought with it a very good surprise. But there was an underlying
issue with this.
The woofer located at the bottom of the laptop would stutter
while playing some music or even while doing some simple gaming. This soon became
very annoying. So instead of calling up the Dell customer support, I started
browsing their forums. Turns out, this is a very widespread issue. But I soon
found out that this was a software issue and not a hardware one as most of the
people on the site had fixed their popping issues by either removing some
unwanted drivers, some Dell crapware and some other unwanted software. Some had
a few cores disabled, enabling which fixed the issue. Some even suggested to
stop/unisntall the Mcafee installation available with the laptop.
So obviously, I tried it all, apart from disabling the
antivirus. I had all the latest drivers as listed on the Dell support site. But
turns out, the best way ahead was to go to websites of the respective vendors
and update the drivers from them directly rather than via Dell. This wasn’t something
suggested on the forums. So the first site I checked was nVidia and boy was I
lucky to find an update for the graphics card on my system – GT-540. After
downloading and installing the app, things are looking great, its sounding
great, even somehow better. Maybe its because of the HD audio driver that was
installed along with the Nvidia driver update. Here is the link I found for the
driver, its on the Nvidia servers.
Edit: Turns out, the issue with the popping sound
was not to blame on the drivers. After a few days, the issue had arisen yet
again. And this time I was at loss as to what to do. Again the search
for the possible solution began and on one of the threads on the dell support
forums, I found a suggested solution. This was with removing the bundled Mcafee
anti-virus solution. I was initially a little sceptical but common sense kicked
in, I did it, installed the Microsoft Software Essentials and now… no more
cracking of the sound. The sub-woofer had never sounded better. Glad this is
finally fixed now…
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