Windows 7 to Make Your Ears Happy
According to Microsoft, a high number of PC users experience audio clicks and pops when listening to music or watching a movie. Microsoft calls these audio anomalies "glitches."
Microsoft's Windows 7 blog team wrote:
Audio is especially sensitive. In order for you to hear music from your speakers, data needs to be delivered to your audio hardware approximately every 10 milliseconds, or 30 times in the blink of an eye! The challenge is that your PC is usually doing a lot of other things at the same time you’re listening to music, such as streaming that YouTube video or downloading that new song, and many of these other tasks have complex timing requirements as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much – a slow network driver or a graphics driver that requires plenty of CPU time – to prevent your audio from reaching your ears in a continuous fashion.
Microsoft's Windows 7 blog team says that with the final release of Windows 7, users will experience better audio quality across the board. Microsoft's research team is working with several major PC vendors to get down to the root of the audio glitch problem but the company indicated that more than 4.3-percent of people had 10 or more glitches during each computing session.
Users alone weren't the only indicating factor for this study. Microsoft showed that laptop users experienced more glitching than desktop users. In fact, the number of laptop users experiencing glitches doubled that of desktop users.
More interesting is the fact that certain brands of computer makers showed my glitched units than others. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not reveal the names of the manufacturers that it studied.
Microsoft is doing a lot of things to improve the user experience of Windows. From revamping the taskbar to tweaking sound performance, Windows 7 final is shaping up to be a good update to Windows Vista.
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Just use AIMP.
Awesome, lightweight, and no glitches even in 100% CPU load. Gone are the Winamp glitchy days for me.
It is no secret that all the G50 and G71 line of ASUS notebook have a anoying poping noise!
do you guys proofreaders or not?
@mrface
Doesn't look like you do.
I don't usually critique the proofreading on articles, but DAMN!
do you guys proofreaders or not?
Is this intended to be ironic?
But in response to the article, i'm impressed by all the little things MS is trying to do to make W7 that much more user friendly. Eventhough Vista wasn't as bad as people wish it was, and is great now after the SPs, they seemed to have learned a hard lesson from it.
Enough proofreading comments, simply accept the fact they don't do it.
who cares about proofing...they are diff language over at toms compared to US. Right??? I really don't know though
Good article! Does this mean integrated sound cards will actually be worth using instead of buying nice hardware sound cards with release and forget drivers? I'm looking at you Creative!
Unrelated:
Has the double header problem come back or is this a extraneous glitch?
i swear to god if win7 isn't what its being hyped up to be.....
Toshiba is by the worst offender. Almost every Toshiba laptop I've worked on has had this issue. And many more have some serious issues with any playback at all, despite the computer being idle otherwise.
who cares about proofing...they are diff language over at toms compared to US. Right??? I really don't know though
The toms hardware you're reading has articles based out of the US and English speaking EU offices. There arent really any excuses for it.
i swear to god if win7 isn't what its being hyped up to be.....
Considering that you can use it right now,... yes, it pretty much is. It's not going to do your dishes, make you lunch, or turn your aging budget machine into a supercomputer, but yea it's the best version of windows to date.
Enough proofreading comments, simply accept the fact they don't do it.
yeah really - this article gets its point across. Good enough for me.
I HAVE USED BETA'S AND RC FOR BOTH VISTA AND WIN7. CURRENTLY I AM USING WIN7 ON 2 SOCKET 478 MACHINES. NIETHER OF THEM HAVE ANY SOUND ISSUES THAT I CAN RECALL AFTER CORRECT/CURRENT DRIVERS ARE ADDED.
AS A SIDE NOTE ... I HAVE TO SAY THAT I AM NOT VERY HAPPY WITH WIN7 EVEN AFTER TURNING OFF AS MANY OF THE UNNECESSARY BELLS , WHISTLES AND TRINKET APPS THAT I DO NOT WANT TO SEE OR USE.
THE OS WORKS "OK" BUT IT IS STILL TOO SLOW FOR MY LIKEING AND HAS AN INTERFACE THAT IS TOO BUSY.
I HAVE USED BETA'S AND RC FOR BOTH VISTA AND WIN7. CURRENTLY I AM USING WIN7 ON 2 SOCKET 478 MACHINES. NIETHER OF THEM HAVE ANY SOUND ISSUES THAT I CAN RECALL AFTER CORRECT/CURRENT DRIVERS ARE ADDED.AS A SIDE NOTE ... I HAVE TO SAY THAT I AM NOT VERY HAPPY WITH WIN7 EVEN AFTER TURNING OFF AS MANY OF THE UNNECESSARY BELLS , WHISTLES AND TRINKET APPS THAT I DO NOT WANT TO SEE OR USE.THE OS WORKS "OK" BUT IT IS STILL TOO SLOW FOR MY LIKEING AND HAS AN INTERFACE THAT IS TOO BUSY.
Wow, thank you captain capslock.
To quote a very powerful and educated man, "Seven sixteenths of one inch: That’s the distance you’d have to move your pinky in order to not sound like an idiot. I know the burden of pressing shift to capitalize is a great one, but c’mon, you can do better than that. I used to type emails in caps like yours, but then I decided that I didn’t want a job mixing concrete."
Article number 24354783467 describing how awesome Windows 7 will be.
Microsoft learned a lesson with Vista.
I´m quitting this site.
My Dell Vostro cracks and pops constantly, I sent it in twice and they were like "we'll fix it" then they sent it back saying "we did nothing because we couldn't find the problem" no doubt there hdd had a brand new OS and no other progs in the background.
annoying
This sounds like (excuse the pun) a software bug fix more than anything else. Of course, economy AC '97 devices aren't helping.
I HAVE USED BETA'S AND RC FOR BOTH VISTA AND WIN7. CURRENTLY I AM USING WIN7 ON 2 SOCKET 478 MACHINES. NIETHER OF THEM HAVE ANY SOUND ISSUES THAT I CAN RECALL AFTER CORRECT/CURRENT DRIVERS ARE ADDED.AS A SIDE NOTE ... I HAVE TO SAY THAT I AM NOT VERY HAPPY WITH WIN7 EVEN AFTER TURNING OFF AS MANY OF THE UNNECESSARY BELLS , WHISTLES AND TRINKET APPS THAT I DO NOT WANT TO SEE OR USE.THE OS WORKS "OK" BUT IT IS STILL TOO SLOW FOR MY LIKEING AND HAS AN INTERFACE THAT IS TOO BUSY.
How old is socket 478? Your's is obviously a situation where you would want to stick with XP. An moldy old OS for moldy old hardware.
My 2003 PowerMac G4 had no problems playing back audio while doing other things (including editing video) but my 2007 Dell at work with Windows XP frequently stutters with only 3 other apps open (and one of those is Notepad so...). It's nice to see MS are finally catching up to the rest of the industry 6 years late.
socket 478 is back to the good ol P4 days.
Speaking of glitches:
makers showed my glitched units than others.
According to Microsoft, a high number of PC users experience audio clicks and pops when listening to music or watching a movie. Microsoft calls these audio anomalies "glitches."
These are language barriers. These are simple typing mistakes. Double posted title (not a translation issue). Misspelling "taskbar" is a typing problem. And "showed my glitched" is simply a typing mistake as well. I'm guessing "my" should have been "more".
We all make typing mistakes. But when you're publishing an article on a site like Tom's, you just need to proof read your article once through (at least) before you hit the go button.
My post above is a perfect example. "These aren't language barriers." That's what it should have said. But, since I did not adequately proof read (and you cannot edit later) there's a typo in there.

Good thing I'm not the author of news articles.
As far as the article itself goes, I've not had much issue with popping noises with music on my PC. Have had slight backyard hissing noise, which is usually due to low quality recordings, speakers, amp, speaker wire, etc. But that's usually only if you turn the sound up a bit.
And since I have a pretty darn old set of 5.1 Creative Labs speakers, I don't expect HD quality audio from my system.
My God, you guys are the most anal community of proofreaders I've ever come across.
Anyway, I'm pleased with this news. I make sound effects and music for a living; the more bug fixes for the audio side of things, the better.
The most common causes of popping and clicking are probably driver issues, followed by IRQ conflicts. Both are *usually* easy fixes. Then there's overloading the PCI bus, but thats becoming a thing of the past. Occasionally I hear people who have problems with certain mainboards and certain audio cards not getting along, some people claim this can be solved by playing with PCI settings.
Then there's noise problems - that's usually more common on cheap onboard sound, and a lot of times muting unused inputs solves it. I've even occasionally heard of people claiming that they had crackling that was solved by putting a heatsink on their audio chip. I have my doubts - I think they probably had an IRQ conflict and stuck their card back in a different slot.
Well...it seems that I need to appologize for my forgeting that my caps were on (a work software issue , I'm used to seeing caps) but it also seems as though anyone could read and understand what I wrote. To answer your question ...... I have a few computers that I play with, 4 are running Win7. The one I am using now is P4P800-VM, P4 3 GHz hyperthread enabled, 1GB DDR333 (OEM Dell), BFG FX5700LE 256mb, WD RE3 500GB (the only modern piece in this machine). Yes when I am finished playing/testing with this set-up I will reconfigure and most likely unstall XP PRO and give it to some friend who really only needs a simple computer. My gaming machine currently runs XP but very soon I am going to load Win7 64bit to see what gaming is like in a Win7 world.
I've reverted back to integrated audio on my current gaming rigs. My X-Fi and Audigy's have been terrible with popping and crackling. No issues with the integrated chips. Last good Creatvie card was the Live! 5.1. My integrated chips can pass 7.1 perfectly to my McIntosh Pre-Amp.

Yes, we have anal proofreaders here, it's called the "educated minority in America."
It's nice to know that Microsoft is revamping its "taksbar" for Win7.
Maybe it's just me but I never had any problems with sound glitches, in xp and vista.
But can it play the audio of crysis?