After 1803, AV system is microstuttering every few seconds

I installed the 1803 update a few days ago, and as soon as it had rebooted, I found that YouTube videos would "stutter" every few seconds. For a fraction of a second, everything freezes up and the audio makes a buzzing sound, like a cell phone on vibrate but lower pitched. What I think is happening is that the computer is doing the Max Headroom stutter (remember when computers did that when they tried to play videos?) but extremely fast. I've experienced that before, playing games on a computer whose video card was failing. I then attempted to play a game and listen to an MP3 in Winamp, and they both had the same issue. It's not just the audio; by smooth-scrolling a long webpage while an MP3 was playing, I've confirmed that the screen also freezes during these hiccups. It's almost as if something is stealing CPU clock cycles, but that sounds ridiculous even to me.

I know the issue is specific to Windows somehow, because this computer is a dual-boot with Linux, and I'm able to watch videos, listen to music, and play games in Linux just fine.

"Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops. One or more DPC routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long."

It specifically says that the highest ISR routine execution time was 16.266917µs, caused by HDAudBus.sys (High Definition Audio Bus Driver), and the highest DPC routine execution time was a whopping 100539.530075µs, caused by storport.sys (Microsoft Storage Port Driver). I don't know what's up with that second one, but it's probably not the source of the problem at hand.

Things that have not helped so far:

• Installing the official Realtek audio driver (I was relying on the built-in one before)
• Updating my video driver again
• Running sfc /scannow to check if the file was corrupted (no issues were reported)
• Downloading a program called TweakBit Driver Updater, which turned out to be pretty much a scam—it'll tell you literally all your drivers are out of date, even the ones you just downloaded the newest version for (like my Realtek), and then demand you upgrade to the paid version to actually do anything about it.

The only thing I've seen recommended that I haven't already done is to update my BIOS. I'm sure that would be a good idea in general, because in the ten years I've owned this machine I've never done that. But I don't even know the exact model of my motherboard (it's an off-the-shelf computer) and System Information just says "BaseBoard Model: Not Available".

stevethepocket said:

I installed the 1803 update a few days ago, and as soon as it had rebooted, I found that YouTube videos would "stutter" every few seconds. For a fraction of a second, everything freezes up and the audio makes a buzzing sound, like a cell phone on vibrate but lower pitched. What I think is happening is that the computer is doing the Max Headroom stutter (remember when computers did that when they tried to play videos?) but extremely fast. I've experienced that before, playing games on a computer whose video card was failing. I then attempted to play a game and listen to an MP3 in Winamp, and they both had the same issue. It's not just the audio; by smooth-scrolling a long webpage while an MP3 was playing, I've confirmed that the screen also freezes during these hiccups. It's almost as if something is stealing CPU clock cycles, but that sounds ridiculous even to me.

I know the issue is specific to Windows somehow, because this computer is a dual-boot with Linux, and I'm able to watch videos, listen to music, and play games in Linux just fine.

Since the 1803 update, I have the same brief buzzing every 5 seconds or so and the audio hiccups ever-so-briefly. Have not tried video. I did try to update my video graphics card after reading some old posts that suggested that can cause intermittent buzzing. But the latest driver from Dell won't install without the latest version of .NET, it says. But I do have the latest version of .NET, according to my system information. So that's a dead end.

I'm running a Dell e4200 laptop fitted with a Samsung SSD, 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo, 5MB RAM.

If you come up with a solution, PLEEEEZE post about it. I promise to do the same.

Does it specifically call for the exact version number of .NET that you have? Or is it just saying "the latest" or something like that? Because it might be expecting a specific version that's already obsolete. Microsoft's frameworks are kind of garbage like that; if you don't have a dozen different versions of them running at once, something won't work.

First off, after posting about this issue on the Windows 10 subreddit, I was pointed towards a newer version of the Realtek driver (ironically, on this site) than their official site even had, so I installed that and rebooted. Didn't fix the problem, but LatencyMon did switch to blaming it on storport.sys. Which is problematic because that's the hard drive controller and I kind of need that to always be enabled. I did try disabling the driver for my pen tablet (after disconnecting it), the network card, the print queue, and the card reader, the only things left that looked expendable, and the situation hasn't changed. I even tried uninstalling the audio and video drivers and then rebooting into safe mode. Obviously I couldn't hear anything because there was no sound driver running at all, but LatencyMon still spiked to 100K.