Ask a new question

How do I prevent the Win7 HD Audio Controller driver from loading?

Hello,

I am having a conflict with the Win7 HDAudio Controller driver and an SapphireTech Radeon HD4550 based graphics card in an HP a1477c PC with a PCIe v1.1 x16 slot. Installing the card triggers an install of the HD Audio Controller driver which then causes one of my two CPU cores to go 100% busy, along with the Radeon GPU at 99% busy. Looking at windows resource manager, there are no processes driving activity (99% system idle) but "System Interrupts" are taking 50% CPU (one core). Disabling or uninstalling the HD Audio driver fixes it, but only temporarily as it gets reloaded on Win7 reboot or coming out of sleep. Have tried this on fresh installs of Win7 Pro 32 and 64 bit, with and without the ATI Catalyst Control Center. Have the latest motherboard bios, though it is from 2006. I don't need the HDMI audio on the graphics card; just need to prevent Windows 7 from reloading the HD Audio driver when it boots. My onboard sound is unaffected by this issue and is working fine.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer
Answer

I recently pulled this off the back burner and gave it another go.  I found a workable solution here: http://superuser.com/questions/125032/how-can-i-manually-load-unload-a-driver-in-vista .  I changed the "start" paramenter from "3" to "4" for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\HDAudBus.  It is not the most elegant solution as it doesn't disable the driver but leaves it in a "not working properly" state.  Nonetheless, it gets the job done as the HDAudBus driver does not use any resources, CPU utilization drops to normal levels, and my realtek audio still works fine.  For the most part, it persists across booting, so I haven't found any need to script it as discussed in the above link.  Installing Win7 SP1 did reset the paramenter/driver however, so if not scripted it probably needs to be monitored when updating windows or installing audio related software/drivers.

 

Mike

Was this reply helpful?

Sorry this didn't help.

Great! Thanks for your feedback.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback.

 
 

Question Info

Last updated February 17, 2022 Views 6,794 Applies to: