Last month, I bought a new Dell Inspiron 1720 loaded with some great hardware and Vista Ultimate. It really surprised me that despite having an Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4GHz, dual-core) and 3GB of RAM, I couldn’t get through a minute of audio without it cutting out, crackling, stuttering, glitching… Whatever you want to call it. The problem showed up in every possible audio situation (games, mp3’s, audio CD’s, YouTube, etc.). It didn’t matter if the audio was playing out of my integrated audio or my TC Electronic 24D Firewire interface. I thought maybe my processor or RAM was faulty. Luckily not.

Fast-forward to about a month of on-and-off research & troubleshooting, and the seemingly unavoidable problem is finally taken care of. I only had to read the ENTIRE INTERNET to find out what was going on.

There are a lot of different causes for audio problems out there, but none of the solutions I read about were helping me. It was this CNet News Page that shed some light on the problem, thanks to one little comment near the bottom.

runout9 posted the following lifesaver:

“802.11n adapters are one type of device that can cause this problem! I have 2 different brands, one internal and one external and they cause this on both my XP and Vista systems.”

My Dell Wireless WLAN 1505 802.11n adapter was one of the few things I hadn’t considered, because it was one of the last things I’d suspect to cause problems. I disabled the adapter and immediately had smooth audio playback. Luckily, I had a spare D-Link Rangebooster G USB adapter (WUA-2340) which had Vista drivers available. It could be a strange coincidence, but the aforementioned driver would not install until I went into Safe Mode. Now everything is working great.

The TC Electronic 24D always sounded incredible, but the intermittent cutouts were driving me insane. It’s awesome having things work as they should. I do get the occasional drop-out, but it’s rare and I can live with it until Vista’s general audio bugs are ironed out.