Latency Latency Latency BuzzBuzzBuzz

 In 2011, we sprang for a high-powered PC, a Dell XPS.  I was still cat blogging and processing lots of photos and video for Tabby's Place, and I used that to justify the top-of-the-line Intel CPU and the extra RAM.  

In addition, I ordered twin hard drives with one of those what-you-call RAID setups so there would always be a backup.  I recall that came in handy after a year or so, when one of the hard drives conked out, and all I had to do was buy another HD and re-RAID it.  

Let's skip over the next five or six years.  Somewhere in there Windows 10 came out and I installed it.  I got a job and had less time to do photos and video.  Pat's games in 2011 worked great, but by 2019 the newer games weren't as nice on it.  So we got her a 2019 Dell, one with fewer bells and whistles, but was plenty good enough for her games.  

The XPS went into retirement for awhile, until the COVID quarantine and I dusted it off to keep me company in the home Cigna office.  There was streaming entertainment, whether it was pop music, atmospheric music, or classical music, coming from all over the world and in several languages.  A patch cord fed the sounds through our 2010 Bose Wave, putting some more old technology back to work.

Then (and there's always one of those, isn't there?) after yet another Windows 10 upgrade, a sporadic buzzing began to appear in the audio.  Streaming music was impossible to listen to, and the spoken word not much better.  

That led, of course, to Googling and reading and testing theories, along with switching out hardware and upgrading software.  The result, several days later, is ... no change.  Streaming music buzzes, music on the hard drive buzzes, it buzzes with the Sound Blaster Z, it buzzes with the Sound Blaster 880, it buzzes after refreshing the thermal paste on the CPU, it just won't stop buzzing.  

I've learned a few things, of course, you don't learn much when everything goes right.  There's a piece of free software that told me the problem is in storport.sys, and several bookmarked articles that advised how to fix it, of which none worked.  

Change the name of the file to storport.old and let Windows re-load it?  Windows won't let me rename the file and won't tell me how to get the permission to do so.  

No, what you need to do is disable some setting in the BIOS that throttles the CPU!  Oh really?  The CPU throttle kicks in when heat is building up to a level unsafe for its health.  You really don't want to disable CPU throttling.  And on it goes.

Maybe it's time to haul out the 2002 Sony portable CD player in the drawer under the night table and see whether it still works...