Crackling and popping sound in windows 8.1, especially in Chrome

I've got this laptop for christmas and I've had many problems with it so far but I've solved all of them but this one. I've been looking for a solution via google and can't find anything that works for me. It's an Acer Aspire laptop with 2.7GHz(with turbo boots from 1.7GHz) intel i5 cpu and nvidia geforce 840M video card with 2GB vram. The laptop itself has 8GB DDR3 ram. I've reinstalled the windows 3 times already trying to fix the issue but it's still happening. When I watch youtube videos or streams on twitch the sound pops and crackles and everything starts lagging for a few seconds, especially when I open another tab. Rarely happens in games and when I watch movies in the laptop. I've tried updating my drivers but every single one of them say that it's up to date. I'm hopeless at this point, can't fix this problem myself.

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IronFly

which browser are you using when watching youtube and twitch?

GeKKo

I'm using chrome, just tested it with internet explorer and it works just fine. So yea, I can fix that by changing browsers but pretty sure it's not browser related because it happens sometimes in games and when I watch movies using VLC as well.

gavank

I have the same problem. I origonally thought it was a sound problem and i would delete and reinatall my sound card. It worksed for a little while but now it slow returns untill it slow gets so bad you cant use the laptop. But i've found it happens when avast checks a web page. or a new page uploads. The curster also becomes uncontrolable. freezing and stuttering. i've been dealing with this since problem for some four months now and i'm getting **** off about it.

Anybody got any ideas? please......

GeKKo

Well, I don't want to jinx it, but I think I found the solution. I've started googling again and I saw some posts that DPC Latency Checker doesn't show good results in win8.1 machines so I donwloaded latencymon, used that to check my latency and it showed that my ndis.sys adapter had the highest latency or smth like that, I don't really know the right terms. So I googled that and I found out that that is for the network adapter, I disabled the network adapter in the device manager (this one http://gyazo.com/f9929d299ff557d926ff1f09e33c081a ), restarted the computer and the pops are gone. I really hope this fixed the issue permanently and it won't be back tomorrow. Latencymon still shows high latency tho, however it doesn't pop anymore so idk.

IronFly

First of all, nothing against Avast but i saw the worst spikes/lags on browsing or system hangs; so an easy thing to try is to uninstall Avast and any over antivirus (apart Microsoft security essential that is ON by default on Windows 8.x), reboot and check about spikes and lags.

about latency on tcpip, i would update LAN and wifi drivers if possible, give a try also to non official Acer drivers, maybe this can fix this kind of issue.

in my experience pops appears when CPU and chipset have high loads and audio streaming can't have all the resources needed, this can happen for wifi, LAN and even HDD activity; so it's an hard task to find the culript.

as last resort i would check if any BIOS update is available and flash it.

GeKKo

I've uninstalled Avast, downloaded and installed these drivers: http://i.imgur.com/6dRnWHL.png , restarted my laptop and LatencyMon is showing high latency: http://i.imgur.com/RuO9or5.png

IronFly

i would load default settings on BIOS, normally this setting is on the save page or the last one on BIOS.

load optimal or default settings, then save and exit.

reboot to system and try some videos that had problems on audio, don't rely only on DPC latency test.

GeKKo

Right now there is literally zero popping/crackling, I'm gonna wait until tomorrow and see if it'll work fine. Thanks for your help once again. Do you think I can reinstall Avast? Or should I try another software?

GeKKo

I've downloaded every driver and installed them (since most likely they were outdated anyways). Tomorrow I'll see if it fixed the issue or not. LatencyMon is still showing latency.