Hi,

I've installed XP on my old IBM thinkpad t22. It's a P3/800/384. Whenever I move Windows, use Opera, refresh etc, i.e. often when doing some graphics/gui related things, my audio gets distorted for 1/2 second. Distorted, i.e. like a bad radio, autechre distorted like... almost noise only... It's not a player issue. There's no cpu peaks at that time.

Maybe anyone has an idea? The thinkpad has a Crystal Audio sound device, driver is "5.1.2600.0" which came with windows update.

I hope it doesn't have that issue with the sb audigy pcmcia card, I would have to revert to W2K then... XP is a bit better, not so much problems with p&p of my pcmcia cards....

Thx

You didn't have that noise with 2K?
I was going to suggest that it could be due to non isolated components, that cause interference.

You could also try muting mic and all the extra (aux, tv, whatever) inputs to see if any of those is partially responsible of it.

I initially discard problems with the graphics driver if you say there's no CPU peak usage when doing so.

The fact audio gets distorted when moving windows is a dead giveaway. I suspect it would also happen when scrolling a large window.
This sounds exactly like a VIA chipset PCI latency issue, or like your video driver playing unfair with the PCI bus. Many video card drivers (used to?) fudge their benchmarks by ignoring interrupts on the PCI bus (your sound card) and taking all the bandwidth for themselves.
There are patches available for both issues, I haven't had to deal with this for a few years, so I don't still have the links on hand.

In reply to JAZ - CPU load won't peak if the video card is hogging the bus, it is a bus timing issue, not a CPU saturation issue. It takes very little unfair playing on the part of a video card to mess up the real-time nature of the audio stream.

Thanks for your answers...
Now, after a reboot, I can't get it to appear again. Strange... Maybe it's because before it did awake from hibernating a couple of times...
BTW I didn't have that problem with Win2k. And AFAIK the IBM thinkpad t22 has the intel 440bx chipset...

No, the 440bx was the PII and first PIII's chipset (up to 550 or so, can't remember)

Where can I find the info in the device manager? I do not fully understand the chipset term. It's about the mainboard, right? I'm not sure, but I reckon it's intel stuff.

Device Manager generally isn't helpful in answering questions like these. Either reference IBM documentation or use an identification utility like CPUID.