JohnB
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Dell issues Alienware M17x stuttering audio fix, will it stick?
About a week after we ran an update on the Alienware M17x stuttering audio problem, Dell's community manager John B. has written in to let us know that the company has posted a fix. It entails using a particular BIOS revision, dropping to the Windows native mass storage driver, and installing the latest Alienware wireless card driver, all of which are available for download at the source link below. In Dell's testing this has removed the latency spikes that have caused the rather undesirable audio st-st-stuttering issues, but many commenters over at Direct2Dell aren't so sure, indicating that this targeted fix is actually a miss and that things are no better. If you're affected, give this fix a shot and let us know whether you have success. If not, perhaps the registry tweak we posted before will do the trick. Update: Seems this is an improvement for many, but not a 100% fix. Mark wrote in to point us to the discussion happening over at the NotebookReview.com forums which, combined with your comments below, makes it seem like we're perhaps not done here just yet. Update 2: Another update from John B. at Dell, indicating that Alienware representatives have started hopping into their UFOs and visiting the homes of affected laptop users, Whitley Strieber-style. No formal update to this (apparently less than comprehensive) fix has been released yet, but information retrieved directly from the users should lead to some final resolution. We hope. Update 3: GIRs91MJ commented to let us know of a beta fix posted by Dell that supposedly goes a long way toward fixing the problem. You know what they say about beta drivers (unclean!) but if you're desperate for a fix, give it a go.
