I’ve had a HP laptop in several times in the last week, suffering from severe audio stuttering – in Media Player, VLC, when playing DVDs, and even just playing the Windows start-up jingle. It’s almost like when I had a nasty 16-bit ISA soundcard in my ancient PC and tried to play Half-Life.
We tried all sorts – scanning for viruses, defragging, reinstalling drivers, reducing the hardware acceleration, adding more memory, changing the volume… everything. But it still kept doing it.
I did notice that in Task Manager, whilst playing MP3s in Media Player, svchost was spiking at around 80% CPU usage, and Media Player itself flicked between 30-odd to 80. Playing the MP3s in other media players showed a similar thing. It was all very strange.
Thankfully, the ever amazing internet and some carefully chosen search terms married up to provide a solution. It would appear that some HP laptops of similar age to this one, as well as other machines (notably Sony Viaos) are prone to suffering from audio stutter. The reason? A mis-detected hard drive mode!  It seems that XP is seeing them as PIO rather than DMA drives. You can change the setting manually, but after a time, XP forgets and the cracked sound returns.
This forum topic explains it a bit more, but, more importantly, is what led me to this page – complete with a VBS script to fix the problem once and for all!
