Win 7 64 bit Realtek audio, free avast version so no firewall and I get a similar issue with audio after a certain amount of time
Which indicates it is not the firewall , ...
No it does not. That many people have realtek audio is caused by the fact 80% of motherboards with onboard audio use Realtek chips.
I'm using a dedicated soundcard (asus xonar dg) and have these problems. So it's not limited to Realtek soundcards.
That a person without the firewall has the same issue, does not automatically mean the problem therefore is never caused by it for others. There might be more possible causes of the same symptom.
DPC spikes and the associated audio stuttering can be caused by:
- Faulty USB drivers/controller
- Faulty Soundcard drivers
- IRQ conflicts
- CPU energy saving throttling mechanisms
- Faulty network card drivers
- Choking of network interface
- Nvidia powermizer drivers
- etc...etc
I have tested with both wireless and ethernet on my systems, and today my sons Win7 AIS system has been running YouTube music videos for 4 hours straight and no hint of a problem.
Congratulations! Again your reasoning fails, one case of someone not having a problem does not dismiss the problem others are having. You're making very fundamental
logical fallacies.
For me it's simple:
If I install the Avast firewall -> Issues (related to the
ndis.sys & aswNdisFlt.sys, the latter being Avast's filter)
If I remove the Avast firewall and use the win 8.1 firewall -> No issues (ndis.sys behaves normally)
The only thing that changed was the firewall...