I have pre-installed win 7, 4G ram, Inspiron 15R N5110 laptop, bought new 3 years ago. As far as I can remember it has always had this glitch, I've made various attempts to "update drivers" without success. I've finally decided to dig deeper to find out what I could do about it.
When an audio or video file is playing, there will be a 'glitch' noise every so often. It is not noticeably a speedup or slowdown of the noise that is playing; sounds like someone has replugged the speakers in their jack, though impossibly quickly.
I recently got a Latency Checker program (DPC Latency Checker), and it shows a big spike in latency on a cycle; the period of the cycle varies. It recommends disabling various drivers in Device Manager to see whether they are causing the latency; they change the period sometimes, but nothing has made it go away.
It used to happen every 30 seconds; when I disabled some drivers it changed to 45, 60, 85 seconds, but is still there. The drivers that affect it don't necessarily have anything to do with audio or video. Some drivers, of course, I'm afraid to just "disable" (like the ones for memory or processor).
I usually run with speakers plugged into my headphone jack, and with a Sony monitor plugged in and displaying separately from and at the same time as my laptop screen. I'm not doing anything compute-intensive or I/O intensive while this happens. It will also happen without the speakers or the extra monitor plugged in, however.
Can anyone tell me other things to check, other places to look? Thanks.