Vista audio lag when hard drive access?

[Craig321]

Hi,

I'm pretty sure this is a Vista problem as it never happened on XP, but it seems whenever the hard drive is accessed (e.g. when Superfetch is working at first boot up) the sound lags a little.

It's not too terrible, I can still recognise the music, but it's just annoying.

Any fixes? Seems to be a fairly common Vista problem.

I have tried the disable enhancements, but no luck there

[Edit]
Onboard Realtek sound by the way (P35-DS4)

Craig.

 

[Craig321]

This morning when I was putting my extra 2GB RAM in (loving Vista with 4GB RAM ) I turned off the power to my eSATA enclosure and forgot to turn it back on, so there was a SATA cable plugged into the back of the PC without any power running to it.

It seems leaving a SATA cable in, without power is one of the causes.

The primary indicator for this issue is that if any of the SATA ports has a drive that is plugged in but not powered up (and not powered down by the AHCI driver programmatically) then you get this global stutter/studder/hickups/choppy. In audio it sounds like tiny repeats. How bad it is seems to depend on what drive brand is plugged in etc so on some combinations it's very tiny and doesn't happen that often, on other drives it's more constant and easy to detect.

Now that my external is getting power again the little bits of almost constant lag have stopped