I’m using a Compaq D5S/P1.7/20j/p/128c/6 AUST
I’m getting whitenoise in the soundcard at work. It’s there all the
time, but drowned out by music. It stops when I have the left mouse button
depressed to select cells in Excel, but releasing it resumes the whitenoise.
Clicking on or selecting stuff outside of Excel doesn’t affect it. Outlook
selections don’t stop it, but selecting stuff in Word stops the whitenoise –
but again, only while the mouse button is held down. Another thing to stop
the whitenoise is dragging splitter bars around in Visual Studio 6. So it’s
not the mouse per se. And just recently, these “fixes” have stopped
working. Stopping a particularly long build restored the fix. Popping up
task manager shows that it seems that the white noise goes away when the CPU
goes to 100%, unless there’s disk activity. Got any suggestions how I can
fix this? And, preemptively, I don’t intend to load the CPU at 100%
permanently for my listening pleasure.
Is is a Compaq desktop or laptop? I once had a Compaq laptop that had terrible noise when trying to listen to music through earphones. The noise was at a constant level – it didn’t change as I changed the volume, so I able to get around the problem by buying earphones with a built-in volume control on the cord, then cranking up the volume on the laptop to maximum and using the earphone volume control to reduce the volume and thus bring the noise down to an inaudible level.
Mute Line In, Aux, TAD, Audio CD and whatever other options exist in Windows mixer to remove all (unused) sources of noise. You can display all these sound sources in Volume Control – Options menu – Properties. You shouldn’t need anything else than Wave and MIDI Synth. Enable digital CD playback for the drive if you play audio CDs. Ultimately, update sound card drivers; see if there are any driver updates for the sound card chipset from the chipset manufacturer rather than from Compaq.