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.
