New Computer, Problems, And Eventually A Fix

Recently I bought a New Dell XPS desktop from a third party company on Amazon. A treat, it was over 2k in money (monitor extra) Top of the line. 8, cores, I9 10th generation, 1 terabyte SSD, 2 terabyte normal HD, 64 gigs of ram and a 4 gig graphics card, Windows 10 PRO.

Of course it runs like hot snot.

Within a day though, perhaps once or twice a day, the sound would distort or buzz for a few seconds, sometimes a video would freeze as well, then all was OK?. This generally showed itself when watching You-Tube vids. Other times, the monitor would lose the signal so I had to unplug the HDMI cable from the graphics card and re-plug to get it back, till the next time.

I tore my hair out quizzing google over this. Generally it was well, uninstall or update your sound drivers or use alternative ones. I did that, and a lot of other things, to no avail.

I was all set to send it back as faulty. Then, I thought, one more deep delve into Google and will give up and return it. And then I found the answer in an obscure forum post. It had nothing to do with the sound at all. The machine was set to switch off the hard drive after 20 minutes, so it goes to do that and realizes it is in use and switches back on, thus causing the glitches, indeed, all glitches, now it's fixed. For those who are interested or having this problem: here's the fix:

Start - Settings - System - Power & Sleep - Additional Power Settings - Change Plan Settings, (on the one you have checked as using) - Change Advanced Power Settings - A small window box will open called Power Options. Open (hit the plus sign) "Turn off Hard Drive After" and change the value in the box, whatever it is to : type in:9999
Click on Apply and exit.

That's it, no more problems.

I emailed the company. They said, "Thanks for pointing this out, we will apply this change to all new machines we send out" Sheeeeeez