Saturday, August 28, 2010

Fix p7p55d-e pro Audio Popping Problem on Windows 7

The p7p55d series motherboards have a common issue with the Via sound drivers where the speakers will "pop" the first time a sound is played after being idle/quiet for a while before hand (as referenced in this form post). This problem seems to persist in every driver version. A workaround I found is to uninstall the driver completely, removing the Via program using the control panel and deleting the remaining driver under the device manager. I then just restarted and let Windows 7 do its magic, automatically installing the default sound driver. The default driver works perfectly with my 5.1 setup, and the sound popping seems to be gone. And as an added bonus, this gets rid of the cumbersome Via HD Audio startup program (shaving a small bit of time off startup and freeing some resources).