Constant Audio Popping With Different Cards

I have recently switched from XP - 32 bit to Windows7 64 bit Home Premium via an upgrade license.

When I did the “upgrade” I chose to format the hard drive before installing Windows 7. When I performed the upgrade, I had my Creative X-Fi Extreme Music in my board’s only PCI slot. (Check my profile for my rigs specs). Once I started playing audio files, I noticed popping and clicking. I remember reading that X-Fi cards are famous for this so instead of fighting it, I just decided to uninstall the card and use the Onboard sound (Realtek AC97).

I uninstalled all the Creative software and when I uninstalled the hardware through device manager, I select the option to remove the driver. I rebooted, and enabled my onboard sound. I downloaded the most up to date audio drivers from Gigabyte (my motherboard OEM) and installed said drivers. I immediately noticed the same popping and clicking.

This surprised me so I looked at possibly flashing my motherboard BIOS. Upon reading the notes for what they changed to the BIOS, none of the updates sounded like they could have anything to do with my issue. Those notes are below:

1. Improve VGA card compatibility
2. Improve S3 resume compatibility
3. Intel®Core™ i7 processor D-0 stepping support.
4. Enhance Core i7 D0 stepping compatibility
5. Fix abnormal messages from EasyTune 6 and DES in Vista
6. Update new CPU microcode

I did not flash the motherboard BIOS. Instead I decided to try one of my recording sound cards. This one being an external USB sound card. A Line6 Toneport UX-2. I had the SAME clicking issue but since this soundcard has the ability to change the buffer memory, I gave that a try. I extended the buffer all the way to 4096MB. This seemed to help, but now the audio only clicked once every 10 seconds instead of every 5.

I did some digging and someone said that X-Fi cards click because the memory of the machine exceeds 4gig. I brought up MSCONFIG, changed the usable memory to 4gig. I uninstalled my Line 6, and downloaded Driver Cleaner to clean out the Creative and the Realtek drivers, booted into safe mode, deleted the registry keys and remaining drivers for the X-Fi manually. Shutdown, reinstalled the X-Fi and have the same clicking and popping.

I am now at a loss and throw myself before you to help. Let me know if there is something I am missing and thanks again for taking the time to read this book. I just want to be thorough so you knew what I had tried.