Okay, so I bought a laptop on a whim a little over three years ago. It was on sale, but it was an HP. Yes. Hp sucks. I know. But all I planned on doing on it at the time was browse the internet, work on basic projects, and play games minimally on it. Yes, laptops suck for gaming. I know. I am not crazy about having everything with max settings. As long as the game doesn't look like it has one texture and runs smoothly I am fine. Basically the point of this opening paragraph is respectfully request that you don't poke fun/talk down at me for my crappy laptop choice and please try to help if you got anything. I get it.
Anyway, at time goes on I tend to game on my laptop more and more. I'd say about...six months ago, maybe even a little longer, streaming videos (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would rarely buzz.
Say if someone says in a video, "I put the glass on the table."
Well, if this buzzing occurred in that sentence it would sound like, "I put the glass on the tAAAAAAAAAAAABle." The 'A' sounding like it was in super slow motion along with the video pausing. The buzz only lasts a half second or full second. Very rarely exceeding that short length. This happens far less in Chrome than it does Firefox.
Back in June my laptop informs me that I have a hard disk error. It won't scan it from start up, but scanning the drive through windows reveals that there is nothing wrong. The hard drive doesn't sound bad when in use, and the laptop runs fine. The only problem is that audio buzzing thingy that happens.
Well, basically, almost every game I run now has some sort of audio or visual stutter. These aren't high end games that are making my laptop work its ass off. I been testing three games while experimenting with trying to fix this problem (more on that below). They are Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight, and Rouge Legacy.
Hotline Miami's sound plays uninterrupted but the game will occasionally pause for 1 to 3 seconds. This happens specifically with any random sound effect. It doesn't happen often enough to truly bother me, but there you go.
Shovel Knight runs perfectly visually, but the audio skips like a scratched CD. Sometimes it's only here and there (thankfully my first playthrough was like that), but now it seems like there is some asshole DJ in that game making the audio skip into bad remixes.
Rouge Legacy was a test game because that's one of the games I played before that ran 100% fine before any of these audio problems occurred. The game would stutter in time when some sound effects were played, like Hotline Miami, but not nearly as bad. Most of this seemed to have been quelled by messing with the in game settings.
I also tried to mess with the capability and other options using the property tabs for Hotline Miami and Shovel Knight. No matter what I throw at this problem both of those games have the same problems listed above. I know Hotline Miami has always ran a bit funky on the PC, but there is NO WAY Shovel Knight should have skipping audio.
So to attack the audio problem this is what I have done. I am running Windows 7 64 Bit btw.
*Scanned for viruses using Malware Bytes, Spybot, and even Windows Defender. No problems detected (which I do beleive in terms of viruses, malware,etc).
*Ran disk checker. Four times.
*Defragged laptop
*Ran CCleaner
*Uninstalled and reinstalled audio drivers (laptop has ones for the laptop itself and drivers for when I connect to my TV)
*Uninstalled and reinstalled graphics drivers for good measure
*Disabled audio/graphic drivers that aren't in use.
*disabled network card/tried playing offline naturally
*Googled my problems and found numerous solutions about crap to disable and/or remove from HP. I had a good amount of it disabled/removed as it was, but even the extra stuff I disabled/removed doesn't make a dent in it.
*Went to playback options and disabled environmental sounds options.
*rolled back audio/graphic drivers
*latest or older audio/graphic drivers don't make a difference
*I have my laptop running for maximum performance. Tinkering around with ANY power setting did nothing.
*Disabling windows sounds (i.e. only makes the startup sounds and that's it)
*beating the laptop angrily with my penis
Okay, so I was just kidding with that last one. I am honestly losing my mind over this. While my laptop says it has a hard disk error when I start it, I have noticed that my problem happens to numerous laptops of ALL brands after all the threads I have read this week. Sometimes weird audio problems like mine or similar to mine happen to laptops that are brand new.
I have never put my laptop under stressful conditions. Never was an idiot who tried to run Cyrsis on it or something. Most of the games I play on there are simple games that laptops older than mine can easily run without breaking a sweat.
There are no other problems with the laptop. Speedwise, it runs like the day I got it. The only thing is that some games stutter which I am convinced is audio related. Like, I understand that a hard disk error is a VERY bad thing, but if my HDD was failing, you would think that it would run loud and I would have far more problems. My laptop hasn't BSODed or anything. It boots up fast. I have no clue what it going on.
