[Weyland-Yutani]

So I installed Vista Ultimate with Boot Camp on a 2GHz white iMac, which went without any issues.

I then installed the Apple drivers for Windows, iTunes, Quicktime and Safari.

Nothing else on that installation so far. Now I play a song in iTunes and every once in a while the sounds starts to stutter for one or two seconds. I tried playing a video and the same exact behavior. I installed EVE-Online, and the exact same thing happens.

The sound plays fine, but stutters every 20 seconds for about 2 seconds. It's like popping noises that distort the sound. Of course if nothing is playing, then everything is silent and no stutters or pops.

I tried using both the external speakers and the internal ones, but it doesn't change anything.

Anyone seen anything similar or could guess what the problem is?

[Weyland-Yutani]

After searching the internets high and low, I found what was causing the problem. The Wi-Fi.

Nothing wrong with the sound drivers. The sound consistently stutters UNTIL you disable wi-fi in Vista.

Seemingly Boot Camp makes some mistake regarding drivers for the wi-fi or somehow screws up so Vista just uses some default drivers that it 'guesses' work.

Indeed they do work, but they seriously cause some conflict with the sound, so it stutters. Well here's the best solution I found:

Well, after monkeying with this for about 3 solid weeks and 12 straight hours last night after wasting my money for the Leopard upgrade hoping that would solve it, I think I've got a 99.5% fix, at least for my iMac. Problem may be different for MacBook users due to a different wireless card but the web info is conflicting so I'm not 100% sure. Reformatting and clean installs of Leopard and Vista didn't help.

First some background: There appears to be some sort of conflict between the sound hardware and the wireless network driver, since disabling the wireless adapter makes the skipping disappear completely. On my iMac (intel dual 2.16 ghz, 3gb RAM) the problem seems to be caused by the fact that the boot camp installer thinks I have an atheros wireless card, so it's installing the atheros drivers. I've got a broadcom card, so those drivers don't do a thing, and the driver that's running is MS's 2006 version of the Broadcom driver. You can see this by going to Control Panel --> System --> Device Manager --> Netowrk Adapters --> Broadcom 802.11n --> Properties --> Driver.

To fix:

1) Go to Control Panel --> Programs and Features --> Windows Driver Package Atheros... and uninstall it. Not sure this is completely necessary because I don't think the driver actually loads, but it's wrong so might as well get rid of it. Restart.

2) After booting to Windows, insert your boot camp CD. Cancel the auto-run. Go to Computer and right click on the DVD Boot Camp drive. Select "Explore". Open the "Drivers" folder and double click the "BroadcomInstaller" package. Restart. Go back to device manager and check to make sure it says version 4.80.75.0, with a driver date of 01/08/07.

I still get a teeny little bit of skipping, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. If anyone knows of a more updated Broadcom driver please link it!

The bottom line is true, the stutters are far less prevalent, but are still present. They do happen a noticably less with the right wi-fi driver active.

Note that they completely disappear if you turn wi-fi off. Unfortunately I need the wi-fi AND sound, so this is the compromise

This issue is known in the Peezoid world as well and wi-fi conflicts seem to be the culprit. I suspect this won't be fixed completely until Vista gets a service pack.

[ghporter]

I think it's a Vista drivers issue overall. Let's say that Vista is not "completely without flaws", and that effective and well-written drivers are not as common as they should be. I'd suggest looking for newer and better drivers down the road a bit, both for the WiFi and the sound system.

[K-mart Shopper]

Hiya Folks.

This problem is not related to your macs, or Vista, really - but Windows, yes. On my HP DV6000 running Vista, I never had any sound issues.

With XP installed, I get the dreaded scratches in my music. The only thing that has helped me so far is to downgrade the Broadcom driver to 4.100.15.5, dated 10/12/2006 - it has greatly reduced the amount of scratchy skippy sounds. Believe it or not, updating to the newest driver (above HP) did *nothing*.