Distorted sound on T42p

[KillaByte]

Hi,

after my system board was exchanged in january I experienced sound distortions sometimes when listening to MP3s. I wasn't sure if this problem wasn't there already before the exchange of the board.

Yesterday I re-installed WinXP (before that I ran Win2K). After the re-installation the problem is worse than ever - even the shutdown sound of WinXP gets distorted heavily. I tried re-installing the SoundMAX driver several times but that didn't help.

Because the problem persists on a freshly installed system I guess that the hardware may be faulty (maybe the system board again?!).

Before I call the IBM service guys I wanted to have some second opinions. I recorded the distortions using the stereo mix so you can listen to it for yourself:
Windows XP shutdown sound
Snippet from "A Perfect Circle - The Hollow" (AudioCD playback)

I noticed that during the shutdown sound distortion the hdd led pauses when the sound lags. But I don't think that a faulty harddisk is the problem because soundfiles played over the network get distorted, too.

The machine is a 2373-HTG.

Very strange...

[dvorak]

Didn't sound like software problems to me.
Of course, if you have free time and are simply interested, you may do a system-restore with those IBM CDs, if then it also doesn't work, there's no possibility of IBM not-changing your TP's motherboard, as they also test out things with that default setup.

[KillaByte]

After the system board got exchanged (again!) everything's fine.

Like last time when they exchanged the system board the serial number and uuid were left blank - I start wondering if they have ever actually read the hardware maintenance manual (I'm starting getting used to enter this stuff by myself using the HMD)...