Snap Crackle Pop, and no its not my cereal

[eedmond]

I got pops and crackles on my sb live 1024 player. I did the lot. Drivers, installed the os over the top. Checked with creative support, who were most helpful seeing as it was an OEM card. Finally did the simple thing, checked the background processes and found it was SETI, that damm prg was throwing noise onto the pci bus. Uninstalled it and the pops got unistalled as well. I occationally get pops now but only in times of heavy CPU load.

I do have a program called United Devices running in the background working on Cancer research. I will try turning it off when playing and see if the problem goes away. You can look at it here http://www.grid.org/home.htm

On another note I bought a Audigy 2 and installed it. It is 10X better than my Audigy 1 but I still get a few pops here and there, seems to do it usually under load. Gonna try turning of UD and see what happens. Would never have thought of a program like SETI or UD causing sound issues.

-Eric

[Archer]

Does it crackle when you are in safe mode?

Do you have anything electrical nearby?

[eedmond]

Does it crackle when you are in safe mode?

Do you have anything electrical nearby?

Unknown if it pops in safe mode. I can only get it to pop while playing Horizons so far and I don't think it will run in safe mode.

Does it pop if the light is off? 2nd computer shouln't matter - you're concerned about electrical equipment with transformers. I would experiment with turning off other equipment on the same circuit.

I will try turning off my light and see if it pops. I don't know if these have transformers but on my desk I have my 21" monitor with my Tower right next to it. Next to my tower is my subwoofer (Sony SRS-D300) next to that is my HP Deskjet 932C and next to it is my APC Back-UPS XS 1000 battery back up. Next to that is my Alarm Clock and the other only other thing in my room that draws electricity is my Lightbulb which I stated earlier as a Fluorescent.

I know Battery back ups are not supposed to be near computer towers. The manual says about 2-3 feet away. Mine is approx. 3-4feet away. I am not sure if all my cords will reach it if I move it farther but I could attempt that.

-Eric

[eedmond]

Just tried it with my lights off. It just so happend to have the worst poping and crackling fit when I started the game since I got my Audigy 2. It was near as bad as when I had my Audigy 1 in it.

-Eric

[confus-ed]

The more you say the less I think its outside interferance ...

[eedmond]

Any ideas what it could be? Possible the PCI bandwidth issue that Creative says is a possibility? I do not know the PCI bandwidth information and what a SATA PCI card can eat of it. I have been listening hard to my HD when it happens and it seems to me that it is always at a time when the HD is being accessed. Perhaps I should mess around with the PCI Latency timings in my bios from the standard 32 to something else? This is all uncharted territory for me. Any suggestions would be helpful.

-Eric

[confus-ed]

Any ideas what it could be? Possible the PCI bandwidth issue that Creative says is a possibility? ...

Absolutley ! I said so earlier .. if its VIA chipset try the latency patch I suggested earlier, if its 'a.n.other' chipset 'tinkering' with latency values if you have 'em in bios (many don't) might help, but its gonna be 'trial & error' & might result in a few 'no boot' situations or 'other strange behaviour' - last resort for that methinks ...

You may like to try disconnecting your machine from the outside world, disabling AV & firewall s/w (which are both 'bad' for 'unexpected bursts of cpu activity') & any other TSRs (terminate & Stay Resident) showing in your 'crash box' (when you press ctrl&alt&del). Once that list is 'minimised' try & see if you still get 'snap, crackle & pop' ... this'll give an idea of whether it is latency or just a 'badly setup' beast or 'greedy' s/w ... we can do some 'priority twiddles' maybe to stop any 'hungry' processes munching all the cpu time.

Ooooo ! ... another thing - is all the soundblaster 'bloatware' installed ? That has one hell of an impact !