Poor sound quality with Windows 7 – Crackles Pops Dropouts?

How I fixed my problem with this....

After upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista, I was very pleasured with the upgrade apart from the sound quality while running a few tasks and listening to music.
The music would drop out, crackle and pop, it was very annoying, to fix the problem I tried:

• Changing from on board sound card to separate sound card
• Updating sound drivers
• Updating motherboard bios

I also tried disabling lots of devices in my device manager; none of my attempts fixed the problem.

After *months*of putting up with it, somebody told me they fixed the same problem by changing the ‘Power Saving’ options. This sounded very unlikely to me, however I was desperate and so I gave it a shot.

I went here:  Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options

I changed from ‘balanced’ to ‘high performance’ and the problem was completely fixed.

Before (red bars are bad!)

After

So thats how I fixed my audio problems with Windows 7.