Thinkpads Forum

I've got a T61p, running XP Pro, that I play various games on and I've noticed that I sometimes (not always) have audio crackling issues. The problem is most noticable when I'm playing World of Warcraft or Valve games (Portal, TF2, etc). The odd thing is the sound is usually fine until I alt-tab to the desktop and then back into the game. This almost always causes the sound to totally degrade.

The laptop is only like 5 weeks old, and I never have these crackling issues in Windows when playing DVDs or any other audio. Only when gaming.

Has anyone run into this issue? Any suggestions? I thought maybe different drivers would help but I can't seem to find anything other than the default SoundMax drivers.

I had the same issue on a T60. You likely need a new motherboard. There's a tiny likelihood that your speaker cables are poorly connected, or some high frequency cables are loose, but that's about it.

... or perhaps there is some fancy driver issue. But I doubt it.

Did you figure out a solution for this?

In the end the solution that worked was a motherboard swap.