Hi everyone

I recently got a new laptop, a MSI MS-1672. It has an AMD ZM-80, 4GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, Geforce 9600M, etc, so its not underpowered or anything. I have a Realtek ALC888S card which detects as HDA Nvidia in the Kmix. I installed SUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1.3 and kernel Linux 2.6.27.19-3.2-default x86_64. I get an error message about Nvidia sound failing at KDE start and falling back to default analog. The problem is the audio sounds like it is skipping like a scratched CD when I listen to music or anything more than a second, no matter what program I am using. Looking at top, amarok was only using 5% CPU. I tried renicing it to -20 and that didn't help either. Anyone know what's causing this issue?

In KDE you might want to try going into the settings for sound (click on the big F on the panel, go to sound) and try moving a choice up or down. I had to do that to get my sound settings right.

Yeah that didn't help so I installed Debian testing, with KDE3, which fixed the problem. I don't know why they made KDE4 is so mac-like. Debian testing's 2.6.26 kernel doesn't support my wifi card though, so looks like I'll be doing Source Mage on this laptop after all.