Hi, I'm having a big audio problem with my AMD Athlon XP 2600+ machine running XP. This has been a problem now for many months and i've been trying to fix it myself ever since, to no avail! When playing audio (of any sort, i.e music in Winamp) i get a very annoying lagging/crackle sound that seems to be related to the CPU activity. It is very consistant and VERY annoying. I was lead to believe at first it was maybe the onboard sound of my MSI nForce2 motherboard being faulty or incompatible, but after purchasing an expensive Audiophile soundcard, the problem was still there! For a test once I even installed Windows 98SE and found the audio problem was completely GONE! I couldn't believe it but my CPU is built for XP and i much prefer it other than it's sound problems! I have tried everything to try and fix the problem under XP, i.e. given the card its own IRQ, turned of APIC in bios, changed ACPI to Standard PC in Device Manager, just about EVERYTHING i've come across on the net and nothing works. Since the problem is completely non-existant on Windows 98 it cannot be hardware or heat related, but maybe driver (i've tried all combination of drivers imaginable also!) or a compatibility issue. Does anyone at all know of anything I could turn off/change under Windows XP to try and cure the problem? Please please? It's such an annoying problem. The fact that it works on 98 and not XP must mean something specfic and I'm in need of someone knowledgable in such areas! Please people there must be someone who can relate or suggest an idea? Many thanks in advance. - Ed

under the volume control make sure your "line in" bar is not all the way up, that can cause backfeed and cause static

Please make sure your mic is muted. Leon Wisnensky The Hot Dog Vending Pimp

Thanks for the response. I have muted all but Wave and still no luck. Something else I've noticed is that the noise seems to increase whenever there is CPU activity, even a 1-10% change in the CPU can cause my playback to make some really nasty sluggish, crackles and lagging noise. But the more CPU activity, the worse the noise! As you can imagine this makes it impossible to work with music of any type on this machine! So very annoying... Any more ideas, anyone? Thanks - Ed

Anyone, please?? - Ed