Hi everyone, Maybe somebody can give me and Dell a hand? Please.
About six weeks ago now I had to buy a new computer after my (not so) old one keeled over and bit the dust. I got a Dell Inspiron 560 running Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium. I re-used my old screen, keyboard, cordless mouse, printer & monitor. After I had loaded all my software I began to play a CD in the DVD multi-writer drive using Windows Media Player. I noticed that at about every 14 minutes there was a momentary drop-out of the sound. Every CD played since then has had the problem. If I rip the CD to the hard drive and play that there is no problem. Dell has replaced the optical drive but that made no difference. They have asked me to try all sorts of things and I've tried everything that I can think of as well. Their last hope seems to be to return the system to them and let them, if need be, reformat the whole of the hard disk despite my having created a second partition which I do not want destroyed if it can be avoided. I could reformat the HD myself and re-install Windows but I have no real confidence that it will help. I have suggested creating a third partition and making the system dual boot but there seems to be dire warnings about doing so and I haven't tried it. After 4 or 5 weeks of e-mail conversations with Dell's UK support the problem is exactly the same as it was at the start. I could list everything that's been tried but it would probably take a week. Besides somebody might have a variation on a possibility that would be assumed to have been tried if I list everything, if you see what I mean. The two things that I will mention are that I have booted without any of the normal start-up stuff being loaded and the problem was still there. I tried to boot into safe mode but the drivers needed for the sound card didn't get loaded so no CD would play. The sound card is Realtek High Def Audio. If anybody has any suggestions they'd be gratefully received, Regards, Alastair.
