This isn't much of a "Tweak" really but it allieviated the problem quite quickly for me, I now have no pops or crackles. It turned out that my Hard Drive was to blame for my sound crackle/skips. I recomend defragmenting first, if your sound still is messing up, try formating. For me I have to replace my hard drive completely to FIX the problem completely. Anything at 7200 RPM, with enough space for all your files will do, I personally recomend one with 8megs of cache as that seems to speed things up nicely. Good Luck!
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Pops/Crackles on IDE Activity
Published in Windows XP Hardware Tweaks by TweakXP Member with 4,986 views and 1 comment
Usman Khan
3 years ago
90% of this problem is actually caused because your Hard Disk is using PIO mode instead of DMA mode for transfer. To fix this, first, recheck all your cabled connecting to the HD and motherboard. Then in Device Manager, goto IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and right click uninstall the controller and then reboot, so windows automatically resognises the controller again and resets the mode to UDMA/DMA if available. Windows shifts to PIO from DMA if it detects something wrong with the transfer crc erros etc