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Audio Pops on New Windows 7 Desktop - DPC Issues?

SecondZephyr

New member
Joined
Aug 10, 2014
Posts
2
Hello,
I found this forum while searching for help in solving my newly-built Windows 7 desktop's issue with occasional loud audio pops. After discovering what DPCs were, and doing research on DPC issues, I installed LatencyMon and Windows Performance Analyzer, and started making xperf traces as I tried updating and disabling drivers.

I tried updating my Nvidia graphics card's drivers, reinstalling the Realtek audio drivers that came on the motherboard's CD (I was using the Windows native audio driver for a while), and tried simply disabling the ethernet adapter to see if the popping stopped without it on (the desktop has no wireless internet currently). None of these solved the issue - pops would still occur if you waited long enough.

The pops tend to be fairly infrequent, but their regularity varies. Sometimes it's a minute or two between them, sometimes it's an hour-and-a-half. They're loud enough that they bother me, though, and I don't have this problem with other computers I own - thus, the research commenced.

There hasn't seemed to be a consistent process that I can trace each pop back to. The closest one has been iusb3xhc.sys, but there doesn't seem to be an update for its driver available for my motherboard...

Sometimes hard pagefaults seem to line up with audible pops, sometimes they don't...

Here's a link to my last xperf trace. It took a little while for it to occur, but the loud, audible pop occurred during the last few seconds of the trace. I stopped it shortly after it happened:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/14f3c75hnpynrej/afterupdatespop.etl

During all of this testing, a separate issue also occurred. I attempted to update the ethernet driver with the one on Intel's site, but found that it was the same version as the one I currently have, even though it didn't appear to be. (The driver was in version 12, but the updater is listed as version 19?) Considering that I'd rather have the motherboard-specific driver if the version is the same, I uninstalled the generic Intel driver and reinstalled the motherboard's driver.

I don't know when this started to happen, but now when I go into Device Manager, right-click the ethernet driver ("Intel(R) Ethernet Connection (2) I218-V"), and click "Properties," I get this:
View attachment 8898

My searches online on this issue have come up completely dry.
I know this isn't directly related to the first question, since the DPC issues occurred long before this happened, but I'd like some thoughts on why this might be happening, too.

After taking a few days trying to solve this, and having weird things happen like this as well, I'm heavily considering just reinstalling Windows. But I thought I should come here first in case some of these things continue to happen after the reinstall. And also get some peace-of-mind. :smile9:

Thank you in advance!
 
(Sorry for the double post - I couldn't find an option that allowed me to edit my first post.)

I ultimately did a clean install of Windows 7, and waited on the desktop before installing any drivers whatsoever. The problem continued. Thus, I set up a return for my motherboard.

As the desktop isn't in a working state right now, it's been a few days without a reply, and my trace file takes up a bit of space on Dropbox, I've removed the link. I may post again later if I have issues with this in the future.
 

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