Tag Archives: Windows 7

Lenovo ThinkPad T520 and Sound Issues

Since I received my Lenovo ThinkPad T520, I’ve been experiencing some really bad audio. Playing video at the same time only made it worse, at least that was my initial impression. The problem mainly consisted of crack and pops in the speaker. I downloaded a small tool called DCP Latency Checker, and discovered that the problem was due to high latency every now and then. I’m talking about latency in the 90000+ µs range.

For the record; I’m using Windows 7 (64-bit) with Service Pack 1.ThinkPad T520

To make a long story short. I search the internet, and found various answers. My first break through was when I disabled the network card, the wired one. The second came from a friend of mine.

So what I ended up doing, in this order, was downgrade the network driver, since the newest driver wasn’t working properly (duh). Searching for Intel 82579LM eventually led me to HPs website. I’ve tried two or three versions from Lenovo’s site, and two other directly from Intel, with only minor improvements. Turns out that the old driver from HP (SP52209.exe), dated 2010, is the best driver I’ve tested so far. Also, I disabled the ATA Channel 3, and eventually Channel 4 as well. I did try the newest network driver with the two ATA Channels disabled, but the problem reappeared.

Device Manager

So there you have it, my solution to the problem, disable a couple of ATA Channels and downgrade the network driver to an old version fresh from HP.com.