Crackly internal sound, some USB devices not working properly

zinou said:

in the latest trace, there was no audio glitch?

No, at least none that I have noticed.

zinou said:

Have tried with the same graphic card version?

Just updated graphic driver on the clean install, so it is the same version. No change in sound. Isn't this cursed?



Okay, I am still planing the repair upgrade, but still didn't get to it, since I need to do full backup, immediately after try repair upgrade, and see if it solves or breaks anything, if latter, I will need to do full rollback again, it's no fun because I need fully functioning and set up system for online classes.




If that doesn't help, I really will go route I should perhaps go long ago. I will do a clean install again (will rewrite the current clean), and gonna be setting everything up and logging it. Speaking of, do you know some good application that would often LOG things like what's installed, which version, and I could be adding custom on-demand descriptions to it? Because if I am gonna do it, I'll have to do it right, it might take months - but I will have to know what excactly happened and when exactly it happened.

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Okay, it looks like some things are happening, I don't understand anything though:

I wasn't doing much in terms of reduction diagnostics about audio issues, instead I decided to do disk cleanup in order to prepare for backup before repair upgrade. In wiztree/windirstat I noticed that in my profile, the appears/local/temp folder had over an 40 GB in size, so was like no, this is going away, and carefully as well as apparently successfully, reduced size to under 10GB. I also ran disk cleanup utility multiple times during this period, other that that I was just moving to NAS/removing data that didn't need to be on my drive.




Later that day, as the part of the maintenance, I disassembled my laptop, and temporary disconnected battery,



(BTW is puffing, I know it's not good, but I need "some" battery (something) to last at least 10 minutes in case of outage for obvious reasons)



and during the assembly reconnected it again which unintentionally reliably cleared/messed up data on CMOS, which as a matter of fact my BIOS dutifully reported to me. I, then, even before 1st boot of Windows after assembly, entered BIOS settings, corrected time, and set all values from their default to how I had it before. All. I am sure I didn't miss even 1 because my BIOS allows to really set like 8 settings actually, so not hard to remember those.




So I booted into Windows afterwards, and since then - I didn't hear but a single disturbance in sound. Currently it's about 24 hours from assembly. WTH...



Those were 2 major things I've done, I didn't do much besides, no messing with drivers, not any system settings nor advanced, I didn't even open autoruns, no registry edits, no backups, no restore of any sort, it just started doing what's it supposed to do. If you'd like trace, I'll be happy to provide to feed my curiosity.



I've also tried that SDR thing I've been complaining about. Before it (as a program, it's reponsiveness and mainly graphics) stuttered and in sound output were audible regular stutters matching with application's stuttering.




Currently, the SDR stutters still, but it seems to not affect sound anymore, sound seems smooth to me now. Little curiosity I noticed is that in the program, there is an small audio latency meter at the very bottom right. I would consider it to be an audio buffer indicator of some sort also. So I'd thought I wasn't low latency. The thing is: on my current system, before, when sound still stuttered and cracked, the value was among 8 to 13 ms. Now, after the sound magically repaired itself, it's in range 20 to 30ms. However on the clean windows install, this delay meter in the SDR software was always around 80 to 120 ms, and never dropped under 50ms. The SW configuration is identical on the both current and clean install, including the driver (version) it's using for usb device.



So... Yeah... That happened... Putting electricity into the rocks and forcing them think was a mistake...

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But I still owe you at least Thank YOU! Mainly to @zinou but to @dalchina also!

zinou said:

The most important is that your issue is now fixed

We can't say for sure what was the action that fixed the problem as it was many parameters involved.

Well yes, I am happy that it is fixed, but I am anxious, that when the issue (shall not) comes back, I won't know how to fix it again, because I still quite don't know, what the actual cause was...

Ah well, nevermind, I suppose we find out next time... I will give it few more days, and if it doesn't come back I will mark this as solved.

Again, Thank you.

Okay guys, I believe I have some findings, I may know what, but not how nor why:

rt640x64.sys is an ethernet driver. And it is possible, that this driver is at least partly responsible for my soud troubles.


Here are facts:
1. On my current system, the rt640x64.sys has an entry in Autoruns, in tab Drivers.

2. there are 2 driver files associated to my ethernet chipset in the Device Manager:

rt640x64.sys of version 10.016.0323.2017
RtNicProp64.dll of version 1.2.0.7

3. By deactivating it's entry in Autouruns, and reboot, the sound crackles dissapear, and vice-versa.

4. On the clean install, there is NO entry for an rt640x64.sys in Autoruns.

5. There is only one driver file associated to my ethernet chipset in the Device Manager:

rt640x64.sys of version 9.001.0409.2015

Can we draw any conclusions from this?
@zinou, you did for me a lot already. If you still got my traces, would you mind looking at them once more, but focusing on said driver(s)?

Thank you all so far.