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Anyone ever find a fix for intermittent glitch on Dell XPS 9350?


Michael Fogarty

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I used laptops for live for years and never had this problem. It even does it when playing back music through media player. This is supposedly one of the best laptops on the market. I got it specifically for a backup to my  desktop DAW and for playing VST live. I have tried it with numerous interfaces (RME Babyface, Studio 192, MOTU AVB series) Yamaha MOTIF and all of a sudden in the middle of nowhere right when you think your latest tweak has finally fixed it -bam -like a record skipping. I have turned off the internet, firewall, defender, onboard Realtek card, and done all the tweaks from various websites for Windows 10. It's really a shame. It's such a nice light powerful laptop.

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Just a few things I experienced, having offline computer always as working in daw
- software trying to go online for various reasons, like looking for updates

I had consistently within 10-12 minutes from start of system this caused crackles.
On Cubase Pro so bad that audio engine restarted completely, 7 threads restarting, so if recording then audio engine and recording would stop

Locating all software doing this checking for updates, or something towards internet - this went away.

Now remaining I had only on every hour of uptime of system left - like 1:00:02, 2:00:02 uptime etc consistently creating the same problem.
Cubase Pro stopped recording, and produced serious crackles playback as well.
Cubase Elements, Reaper, Sonar, StudioOne only produced a minimum pop that these occasions - no recording issues.

I never located this and what produces it. Worked for 3 weeks to solve it, looked for all kind of threads started then, there were none - so obviously in a thread that were running already. If I were online while this hourly, it happends this went away - so something is trying to access internet and unable to. That's how far it went.
I used SysInternals ProcessExplorer to open windows for every process, and filming screens to look over if anything happends in a certain process, no sign of activity.
Looked through Task Scheduler which had some stuff for hourly test, that I disabled, but no difference.

I currently get a small pop in playback in Cakewalk, and just live with this. Nothing affect recording, nor offline rendering - just an hourly pop if transport is running.

It's on Dell Vostro 430 with Windows 7 for me and you see uptime in Task Manager. They changed so much in Windows 10, not sure if there anymore.
Just a few ideas....

...one more thing I found in the process - cpu throttling, so look that performance profile or whatever it is called is only 100% minimum and 100% maximum cpu. But usually seen as if latency is below 200 us normally, there are spikes at 1500 or above at the time.

Edited by LarsF
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As far as I'm concerned recent Dell laptops are a complete non-starter for audio work - especially live use. Just google 'Dell ACPI.SYS latency issues' and it'll become apparent you're better off going with another brand .It's endemic across all their models - even the XPS series, which is often touted for audio work

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thank you Matthew Carr and LarsF. Seems my Sony and Toshiba's never had this problem, or even an older Dell. Such a shame. Such a lovely computer. I also had to put in a new MOBO about a week after it was out of warranty. I'll try to sell maybe and get something else. As much as I appreciate your comment, I do hope somebody has an answer. I can't really fork out another $2000 for a computer I rarely use.

Edited by Michael Fogarty
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@Matthew Carr is correct, the DCP latency on the Dell laptops is attrocious - they have made some pretty poor power system design choices in the hardware, and this directly affects audio performance. I would update the latest BIOS, but they really haven't fixed it. 
 

I ran into a DELL person at NAMM last year and reported it to them in person, and then sent them all the articles  you can find online, but no fix...

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On 10/20/2020 at 2:21 AM, Rico Belled said:

Have you disabled the ACPI Battery Control Method in Device Manager? On my XPS 18 it makes a huge the difference, and on my Surface Pro 3 it means I'm able to run Soft Synths on it at 64 samples buffer size all night long without a single pop or click.

R

just now did. As well as the other suggestions. Again, hoping, Matthew  and Chris that you are wrong. But you seem to be well versed.

Edited by Michael Fogarty
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latest - I did these tweaks and played last night for quite a long time and no glitches.  One interesting thing though is that now the backlit keyboard doesn't work (it used to shut off and on). Now I need to see which of the two tweaks caused it.

 

PS -edit. All I had to do to reinstate the light is to toggle F10. (I use it as a hotkey when using Cakewalk).

Edited by Michael Fogarty
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On 10/19/2020 at 6:21 PM, Rico Belled said:

Have you disabled the ACPI Battery Control Method in Device Manager? On my XPS 18 it makes a huge the difference, and on my Surface Pro 3 it means I'm able to run Soft Synths on it at 64 samples buffer size all night long without a single pop or click.

R

I use a dell laptop, and disabling this driver fixed all my issues. I've been running this Dell Inspiron Gaming Laptop for 4 years with no hitches since. I think I also disabled the bluetooth driver, both of these issues were found with LatencyMon. 

On the subject of the XPS, I use one for video editing, and a laptop fan helps. It gets hot quick due to the small casing. Getting it off the desk with a cheap fan underneath helped a lot. I don't think this will typically translate to straight audio work, but it's good practice. 

Edited by Light Grenade
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On 10/21/2020 at 11:12 PM, Michael Fogarty said:

latest - I did these tweaks and played last night for quite a long time and no glitches.  One interesting thing though is that now the backlit keyboard doesn't work (it used to shut off and on). Now I need to see which of the two tweaks caused it.

 

PS -edit. All I had to do to reinstate the light is to toggle F10. (I use it as a hotkey when using Cakewalk).

So any news on how the system is performing? Did you figure out which of the two fixes did it?

 

R

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On 10/27/2020 at 1:58 AM, Rico Belled said:

So any news on how the system is performing? Did you figure out which of the two fixes did it?

 

R

 ACPI Battery Control Method I think did the trick. Disabling the Dell Support Assist Remediation I will leave disabled as I don't need it. I rarely use the laptop, but I did play last night for a couple of hours and it seems no problem now. I really appreciate your help.

Edited by Michael Fogarty
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9 hours ago, Michael Fogarty said:

 ACPI Battery Control Method I think did the trick. Disabling the Dell Support Assist Remediation I will leave disabled as I don't need it. I rarely use the laptop, but I did play last night for a couple of hours and it seems no problem now. I really appreciate your help.

Great! It's helped me tremendously!


R

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