Snap Crackle Pop, and no its not my cereal

[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 !

[slgrieb]

Forget the VIA patch. The N in A7N8X stands for NForce 2. Eedmond, did you try pulling the Audigy and using the onboard sound? If you don't hear the noise with the Realtek on-board sound, I think I'd have to say bad sound card.

[confus-ed]

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

You never answered ... you can't 'zap' most of this out of task manager, you have to stop the 'services' ... how good xp runs is very often about services !