Hello.

Recently I bought an ASUS F5M-AP035H notebook.

From the beginning I have a strange problem with sound. I don't know what's causing it. It's very annoying and almost paralyzes all sound-related activities, like watching films on the notebook, listening to music or playing games.

The symptoms are mostly technical: when the notebook plays any sounds, longer or shorter, strange 1-2 second interrputions - loud interrupting noises. It's hard to descibe them. Like repeating the last played noise very fast for 2 seconds. And it occurs quite often, like 5 times during 15 minutes of a movie.

What's more - this kind of interruptions occur almost always when I open or close my sound-related files with any program - be it Windows Media Player or AllPlayer of WinAmp.

I thought that this problem is connected with wrong drivers. But I downloaded the most recent from the website, reinstalled them, and nothing helped. Also I reinstalled the newest DirectX and codec pack (K-Lite). Still - the problem occurs.

The problem may be connected with memory, but I don't know how. I've defragmented my disc many times, and it's looking great (Diskeeper shows no problems). Also I cleaned my registry with CCleaner and RegCleaner. No help here also. My running processes list is very short. I've killed all the unnecessary ones. Once also the Splendid process - thinking that it's the cause - but nothing helped.

Please help, this is a big problem for me. It disrupts most of leisure things which can be done on my notebook.

defragging and ram would have nothing to do with this issue.

It is probably related to a bad grounding on the mobo if drivers are not the issue. Or there is a loose or shorting speaker wire.

Thanks for the reply.

So you're suggesting that this is a hardware problem? Not good. The notebook is almost 2 months now. But I've managed to install all the things I need, and copy the data from my previous notebook also. Don't want to lose all this work, heh.

I don't know if this is important, but this interruptions occur almost always (!) when I open a movie file and close it.

And in most cases, after rebooting Windows, this doesn't happen for a while. Or not so frequently. But this might be only an ilusion, I don't know for sure.

PS. Can this be a problem of the hard drive partition? I have WinXP SP2 Home Edition, 120 GB HDD divided into 2 partitions: 67 GB (system) and 42,8 GB (empty now). But both are in FAT32 - isn't it strange?

check the DMA mode of your HDD. it seems, that now it's in PIO mode.

OK, when it comes to this kind of things I'm a noob.

But I presume, that you check/change this kind of things in BIOS, right?

So I run setup and entered the HDD configuration screen. I'll write you down what is there, because I don't understand much and I don't know what to do exacly, what to check.

Here it goes:
- LBA Mode: supported
- Block Mode: 16Sectors
- PIO Mode: 4
- Async DMA: MultiWord DMA-2
- Ultra DMA: Ultra DMA-5
- SMART Monitoring: supported

And the options part:
- LBA/Large Mode - set to: [Auto]
- Block (Multi-Sector Transfer) M - set to: [Auto]
- PIO Mode - set to: [Auto]
- DMA Mode - set to: [Auto]
- Smart Minitoring - set to: [Auto]
- 32Bit Data Transfer - set to: [Enabled]

Does this help? Should I change anything here?

OK, I've stumbled upon something VERY strange.

It seems that rebooting (kill & run once again) the ASUS Splendid (ACMON.exe) process helps. After this kind of boot the sound works fine for a long time. But when I hibernate my notebook (close it, and reopen) the sound is again malfunctioning.

This is just weird.

check this thing: Start/Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager/IDE-ATAPI controllers/Secondary(in some cases Primary) IDE channel/Advanced settings

look for DMA or PIO words in this window.

I've done this. Everything there is set for "DMA when available", and the current modes are "Ultra DMA - 5" or "Ultra DMA - 2".

ok. so, you'll have to reinstall windows from recovery dvd. if the problem persists, then try to record some audio file from the laptop speakers and post it here.