New issue, SoundMax constant clicking noises

[Splaktar]

Hello,

My T60p seems to play most games decently (at about 110 C). Anyhow, the latest problem is that newer games are coming with built in voice communications. The first of these that I tried was Lord of the Rings Online.

The intro and parts of the game w/ voice comms disabled, I hear the sound clearly. But once you log into the game, even with voice comm turned off, there is a constant repeating 3 click noise. It's majorly annoying and I've tried a million things to fix it with little success.

In addition to this, Blizzard and WoW just introduced built in voice comm and I've started to hear about numerous people who are running into this clicking noise problem.

This problem has been seen with SoundMax (Lenovo), Sigmaltel (Dell), and some Sound Blaster (Creative) cards. Some of these manufacturers have provided new BIOS updates and sound drivers to fix these problems. It does not appear that Lenovo has provided the same solution. The latest driver they have is from June 2006. I've been told by tech support people that there have been a number of DirectX driver fixes in the last 12 months and new drivers are needed. What can we do if Lenovo just isn't going to keep their drivers updated?

Anyhow, my debugging and testing is detailed in this thread: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php? ... ost1143441

Similar Sound card issues faced by Creative are covered here: http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs ... e.id=61926

This is a really annoying problem that makes some games basically unplayable due to poor sound support and it seems like Lenovo doesn't even know this problem exists?