Solved (was: Tips for diagnosing sound lag problem)

I wrote:
I've had some problems with a new PC, where the sound plays OK most of the time but lags badly every few seconds.

The machine is based on a Q6600 (G0 stepping) and Gigabyte X38-DQ6 motherboard, moderately overclocked. I'm using the on-board Realtek sound. Other hardware is fairly typical for a high-end desktop: 8800GTX, a couple of large hard drives, Netgear USB wireless networking, Logitech G15 and MX518 for input.

Thank you to those who replied. I think I have now solved the problem, and since it involved jumping through some non-obvious hoops, I'll leave this note for anyone else who hits the same difficulties.

The cuplrit was my Netgear WN121T USB wireless networking hardware.

Although I only bought it a few days ago, the drivers on the supplied CD are *way* out of date. Moreover, the version you get via Windows Update for XP SP2 is also pretty old.

Audio lag (stuttering sound) is apparently a common problem with this wireless hardware, particularly on Vista and for 64-bit users if web reports are anything to go by, but even my 32-bit XP suffers. You can now get updated drivers direct from the Netgear web site (version 5.1 as I write this) that appear to cure the problem.

If you follow the instructions on the web site and try to run the downloaded executable file twice (once to uninstall the old drivers that you presumably installed in order to be able to connect to the Internet and download the new ones, then again after it quits to install the new ones) you may see some problem about error 2721 that aborts the installation process. This appears to be some sort of InstallShield issue. I circumvented it by manually removing the old drivers via Add/Remove Programs, at which point running the 5.1 installer lets the new drivers install OK; others on some of the forums seem to have found the same workarounds.

Hopefully this will be enough for anyone else with the same problem to fix it on their own machines.

Cheers,
Chris
.

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