I’ve been mucking around with MDT 2010 lately, which has made it pretty simple to create an unattended install routine for my Dell Latitude XT2 (hopefully more on that soon) and to inject drivers into the build; however in doing so I’ve found a nasty bug in the IDT 92HDxxx HD Audio drivers from Dell (version 6.10.0.6217, A09).
This particular version doesn’t actually work at all, i.e. no sound plays. In addition, media applications, such as Adobe Flash, Windows Media Player and Spotify, and any system components that uses audio locks up when attempting to play sound. These drivers are listed on the Dell support site for the following systems:
- Latitude E4200
- Latitude E4300
- Latitude E5400
- Latitude E5500
- Latitude E6400
- Latitude E6400 ATG
- Latitude E6400 XFR
- Latitude E6500
- Latitude XT2
- Dell Precision Mobile WorkStation M2400
- Dell Precision Mobile WorkStation M4400
- Dell Precision Mobile WorkStation M6400
I’ve tested these on a 32-bit install of Windows 7 on two machines – a Latitude XT2 and a Latitude E4200, with the same result. Fortunately though, the drivers are not required for playing sound – Windows 7 will find the audio hardware out of the box.
If you have the same issue, open Device Manager and uninstall the device labelled IDT High Definition Audio CODEC, be sure to also tick the option Delete the driver software for this device to remove the driver completely. Here’s what you’ll see in Device Manager:
Now here’s the weird part, these audio drivers also prevent the Hyper-V virtual machine remote console client (VMCONNECT.EXE) from connecting to a VM. You’ll see the client window open but no remote console will be displayed. Odd stuff.
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What drivers should be used in place?
Do they support the onboard mic etc?
I’m fairly sure that the drivers installed by Windows should offer all the features that you need. They have worked for me thus far.
I use v6.10.0.6227 for Vista x64, and there’s actually audio. Only downside is that if one runs any application which takes above 5% CPU, I have stuttering in my sounds/audio. And no, it isn’t the Intel RAID driver causing this – tried several versions, and although there is one version of the Storage Manager which seems worse – I have never seen any PC with this much stuttering.
If you want a plain typewriter, never want to use any CPU-demanding programs or any kind of virtualization (slow uneven execution), then the Lattitude e6500 is for you (very nice keyboard). Although the audio isn’t good, it’s not as bad as some people say (like some Asus laptops where audio is sent to the resting surface, rather than at the user, resulting in some odd counter-phase sounding odd sounding music).
Wow, thank you so much. Spent a couple of hours on this. Your solution worked.
very cool post.. my e6400 kept crashing the audio service because of a buggy stapo.dll, which belongs to IDT. I uninstalled it.. hopefully its more stable now.
I was seeing the same problem, but when I set the Inject Drivers task in the task sequence to only load those drivers that belonged to the version of Windows being installed, the problem went away.
Thank you SO much, I have been trying to fix this for days. I did exactly what you said and it worked brilliantly. I’m glad that I can watch youtube videos again.
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