Help, Audio randomly honks

[monomer]

I have a new (3 month old) HP ProBook 4730s and when I watch any videos on the Internet the audio will occassionally "honk".  I can't describe the sound it makes any better than that... it sounds very much like a goose "honk".  Its not any louder than the normal audio and it honks just once ech time but it reccurs every minute or two and I find it quite annoying.  I've never had this happen on any other computer ever.  This laptop has been making this honking sound right from out of the box brand new.  I've tried reloading audio drivers... didn't do anything to abate the honking.  Does anyone else experience this honk?  Can anyone suggest a possible solution?  or make a suggestion on what I might try?  or additional things I could try to get more information about what could be causing this?  Anything, I just need some direction to go on... its driving me nutz!

[monomer]

Let me expand... my OS is Windows 7 64-bit. I have the latest idt driver 10.6428. After actually timing the honks, it appears to honk every 20-30 seconds on average and some honks are louder than others. It will also honk on during any audio such as a CD or DVD or using windows media player... I repeat again, it is quite annoying so any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated!

[monomer]

Here's more... everything that has audio suffers from this issue music played from hard drive, CD's DVD's, online videos, etc. I actually timed the honking using the computer's clock... I was wrong it isn't random at all, it is exactly every 30 seconds without fail. It's just sometimes the honk is so slight it can be missed if not paying attention. I've tried disabling the IDT driver, I tried using the RealTek driver, I disabled WiFi and Bluetooth, I reinstalled all drivers, I disabled all programs from starting at bootup... none of these things had any effect on the honking... its still every 30 seconds exactly at exactly the same time regardless of if I close programs and reopen them, however if I re-boot the computer then the time of the honk gets shifted but its still exactly one honk every 30 seconds precisely. One thing I did notice is that if I play any audio immediately while its still booting up programs the honking won't start until about 2 minutes or so into the boot up sequence... that was why I tried disabling all programs during boot up to see if I could identify which might be causing the issue... but apparently none of them had any effect because the honking continued even with all those programs disabled. I also notice that there is a slight stutter just preceding the honk everytime... some stutter sound a bit longer or shorter than others, which makes me think its a timing issue of some sort involving the internal clock in the sound card (something to do with jutter perhaps?)... it's as if the audio has gotten a fraction of a second ahead and something is trying to correct this by using a brief delay and that's what's causing the honking sound... it always follow the brief stutter. All this happens in under a second but its just enough to notice. I don't think I'm alone in this at all but since the sound is hard to describe everyone starts a new thread even though we are all having the same problem. I've identified over a dozen of us in just the first 4 pages of threads here that I'm sure is experiencing the same issue, so this is apparently a common problem with HP laptops across many models and in reading those thread looking for insight and answers I see few have claimed any true resolution though many suggestions have been tried... mostly they just quit posting. Sigh...

[monomer · Accepted solution]

YES!!!!  I found the answer and it was soooo stupid its not funny.  I contacted HP chat support and it was the very first solution given as if they deal with this issue routinely.  Apparently it was the HP Power Assistant program.  Once it wascompletely uninstalled and reboot the compute the issue vanished.  Who would have guessed?  Bizarre to say the least... can't believe they don't have this solution in their FAQs on the website.