Noise and Sound Distortion with Wifi Traffic

Hello everyone,

I noticed that there are scratchy noises and very noticeable sound distortion with Wifi traffic on my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 3rd Gen) starting about 3 days ago. With the noises, the mouse becomes sluggish and video playback experiences small pauses, too. I have never had this problem before.

The only thing I remember I changed recently is to hit the "Update Driver" button on the Wifi device in "Device Manager". I have already uninstalled the that device driver and downloaded the 18.40 (most recent) one from Lenovo. It was good for about a day after installing the version 18.40 wifi driver, but the noises came back. I also noticed that any wifi traffic seems to trigger high CPU usage. I suspect this is the culprit, but couldn't find anything online. I suspect it has something to do with Windows 10 regular updates or the 18.40 wifi driver. I've also tried the driver version before the issue occurred, 18.33. The issue remains.

What I also noticed is that the problem seems to only happen after the system has been up and running for a while.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to fix this problem?

Thank you very much for your help!

Jack

What do you mean by Wifi traffic?

Noise and sound distortions have nothing to do with wifi.

You have to be more specific if this is on public or your own wifi network.

inSSIDer will show you channel congestion.

All the Network activity shows is that the computer is communicating with the network. It would not have anything to do with the sound distortion.

The driver that you installed, can be a problem, so why haven't you uninstalled it and see what happens? Also if you are on a Public connection, you will be throttled. 4k/UHD movies will not play properly, unless you are using Wireless-AC and on at least a minimum of 150 mb/s, because of how much information is transmitted. No laptop out there can playback a 4k/UHD movie, unless you have a actual desktop with a graphics card that is at least $200.

Laptops at the most can play 720p videos just fine. No need to be watching anything over 720p, because the screen would not show any improvement.

I have exactly the same problem. I realize that it should not have anything to do with each other, but it does. I can reliably reproduce the problem. I am downloading over WiFi, receiving speed is about 32Mbps. If I now start up a locally stored video, this will stagger, sound gets distorted, and the mouse hangs now and then. As soon as I stop the download, everything turns to normal and returns when resuming the download.

Normal internet traffic does not appear to do this, except for spikes above about 5Mbps.

What happens if you go into Device Manager and roll the driver back one version? Open properties, click Driver tab, click Roll Back Driver button. If it is the new driver, perhaps reverting to the previous one will address the issue. As long as the new driver doesn't include stuff you can't function without, this could be a relatively quick and painless fix. Try it, please, and let us know what happens.
--Ed--

Symptoms sound like something is hogging the CPU, have a look in Task Manager.