Dell Inspiron 7373 Audio Crackling speaker on battery

[darknkreepy3#]

The Dell Inspiron is a great 2-in-1 laptop for 2018, but there are some flaws in software design for the layperson.

A friend said that her audio was crackling and then it went away. She wasn't raising the volume or just one audio playback, youtube video specifically, etc. Was it audio normalization? No. Was it a low battery? No. Was it the CPU or mainboard itself? Yes, in a way, but it wasn't damaged.

Windows 10 especially is taxing on any cpu with all the things it does and processes it loads. There is 3rd party add on software called SmartByte. There are two programs with that name installed. A little web scouring and I found on a Dell community board that removing it got rid of the crackling sound.

What was it? My guess is this, the CPU goes under heavy load when recomposing video from youtube compressed video/audio streams. Something about the laptop on battery power and on "power saver" in power settings lowered it to a super wimpy 0.38ghz, yes under 1 ghz, which would make all the other processes including whatever smartbyte does realtime to audio to make it "better". So, ramping it to normal "balanced" power use for it to 1.7 and 2.6ghz, a lot better than 0.38. And without the Smartbyte software running there was less taxing the cpu and OS.

It makes even more sense when you think about programs to make realtime audio like Fruity Loops XXL. There is a "buffer" meter and when you play too many notes or complex sounds / tracks, it starts to stutter. The cpu is being overloaded. So, whatever SmartByte is doing, it is probably breaking the audio or something in the chipset of the motherboard up, playing with it, and then outputting it, but that leads to on and off breakups of the audio similar to a record player needle scratching across the surface of a record.

Fixed.