Whenever I have my the volume on my computer at a normal level, and I move the mouse, I can hear the movement of the cursor. Any suggestions on how to get rid of the annoying noise?

Don't use on-motherboard audio. Don't use an unshielded internal sound card. Try moving your sound card to another slot.

Usually, when I've seen this happen, it's because:

- You have the volume sliders in the Sound Mixer applet turned way way down, and
- You have the volume knob on the speakers themselves turned way way up to compensate.

The result is that you are amplifying the noise floor of your sound card. This is very similar to having the gains on the amps in your car improperly adjusted.

It's also possible that it's a ground loop of some kind, or even a bug in the mouse driver, video drivers, or audio drivers. But the first thing I'd check is your volume levels.

I have had this annoying problem ever since I built my new PC. The solutions you mentioned are what I've been doing to correct it. However, this makes volume adjusting very annoying.

When the sliders in the volume control are at a suitable level to minimize the internal sounds, it means I get an extremely small amount of travel on the speaker volume control. I can only turn it about 10-15 degrees.

I wish there were another way around this.

ps-oh, and I get this to a smaller extent using a PCI sound card as well. it was more noticeable when I was using onboard audio, but it's still there.

When the sliders in the volume control are at a suitable level to minimize the internal sounds, it means I get an extremely small amount of travel on the speaker volume control. I can only turn it about 10-15 degrees.

Now *that* sounds like a mix-up of the Line level and Speaker (or headphone) level outputs. Sounds like the speakers are expecting line-level, but you're feeding them via a set of amplified outputs on the sound card.

Some sound card makers will cheat, and give you only one mildly-amplified output connector, suitable for driving headphones or small unpowered speakers. They expect you to use this for line level, too, which is just plain wrong (but they do it anyway).

On some sound cards, I get around this by plugging an in-line headphone volume controller into the connector, and attenuating the output before it reaches the speakers. This allows me to turn the sound mixer sliders up without overdriving the speaker inputs. I used to do this a lot in the old Doom days, back when Doom was a DOS application and you didn't have the sound mixer applet to adjust the soundcard volume. I discovered that if you cut back the volume slider within Doom itself, you actually started losing some of the more distant sounds on the map, it would actually reduce your "hearing range" in the game. So it was better to attenuate the volume in the analog domain (on your headphone wire) than from within the game.

A driver re-install fixed that problem for me not long ago (SB Live). I reinstalled all my drivers at once though, so I'm not sure which one fixed it. I suppose it could have been the logitech mouseware driver, but that would be strange indeed.

I tried reinstalling the drivers and it still makes noise...any other suggestions?

I forgot to mention this because the thread disapeared. I fixed my buzzing problem, and it had nothing to do with the computer or the speakers. I don't know enough about cabling, but all I can say is that there are too many wires coming out of the back of my computer. I moved them around a bit until my buzzing stopped, and now I litteraly cannot get it to buzz. There was nothing wrong with my sound card or computer.

My advice: jiggle your wires

I really didn't notice it until I installed Windows 2000...although my girlfriend noticed before when I was using Windows 98.....I have the updated driver, but to no avail....

All the contacts to the speakers are firmly connected? What kind of speakers are we talking about?

Altec Lansing ATP3

Altec Lansing ATP3

Altec Lansing ATP3

Altec Lansing ATP3
Altec Lansing ATP3
Altec Lansing ATP3

That'll be a 6.3 surround system then?

Peter

Oops! Sorry....I didn't realize it was posted 3 times.........how can I delete two of them?

Don't worry about it.

"Don't use on-motherboard audio" what does that mean?

Many computers have a sound system built onto the motherboard; that is, they aren't add-on sound cards plugged into a PCI slot, but, rather, the outputs are directly attached to the main board (AKA ``motherboard'') of the computer (as is the sound processor itself). Very often, these built-in sound devices are (apparently) not well shielded from the other electronics on the motherboard and you can end up hearing odd crossover exlectrical interference. In my experience, the most common one is that you can hear a whitling grinding sort of noise when you move your mouse. Neat!

It seems that this problem usually does not exist when the sound is supplied by an add-on PCI card. Whether this is due to the PCI card being better separated from the other electronics in the computer or if an add-on card is simply of better quality I don't know. But that is many people's real-world experience nonetheless.

does anyone have any other ideas?