I´ve had this problem for a while now:
A few days after a reboot, the audio gets choppy whenever something is going on at the network, regardless of if the audio is streaming or locally stored. The problem gets worse and worse till I reboot the computer, and again it happens after a few days. The audio is the onboard realtek chip, but this also happens if using USB headphones.
This is what I´ve tried:
- bought a new network card (and disabled the old one which was on the motherboard)
- tried all possible settings for various sample rates in the windows audio settings
- cloned the system onto another harddrive and booted from that instead
- installed ASIO4All, which allowed me to make very large buffer sizes, but obviously this only works with applications such as winamp that support Asio4All, so no luck with spotify or chrome.
- disabled all 3rd party services I could find which didn´t seem to be needed.
- used latencychecker to see what could be an eventual driver issue. It reported USBPORT.SYS, which is using the same driver for years - much longer than the problem has been going on for.
- defragmented system partition and the one holding the hiberfile with defraggler.
In fact the problem is now showing up after just half a day...
The motherboard is an ASUS P8h-77V-LE with 16 GB RAM and a 3770k CPU.