HWiNFO vs windows power management

[captain.abstract]

Hello!

Martin,
I would like to ask you as you are the only one who's intimately familiar with HWiNFO's inner workings..

First, let me describe my problem, which is not the HWiNFO's fault, it rather helps to bring the issue to surface.

I've got a USB audio interface, namely Focusrite Forte.

I've been experiencing a strange bug with it, the sound would drop out and continue severely distorted. It seemed to occur randomly, either several times in a row or not a single one in many days, and cost me a lot of nerve cells to figure out the cause. I noticed that launching the HWiNFO would provoke the glitch to occur. Sometimes I would launch the HWiNFO and sound would crash immediately, with huge spikes of latency being reported by DPC latency checker tool... But other times I would do the same and nothing would happen! I only knew that HWiNFO has something to do with it.

I finally found a 100% reliable method to summon the glitch:
1) play some music
2) pull out the ethernet cable
3) launch HWiNFO
4) audio hiccups and gets distorted.

So I thought... what if I uncheck "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" in my ethernet adapter settings in device manager?

Voilà! I plug the cable out... launch HWiNFO.. nothing! The sound goes smoothly.

So it is clear to me now what happens when my ethernet adapter is allowed to get turned off: when I unplug the cable, the system decides to shut it down.. And then, when I launch the HWiNFO, it does something that wrecks havoc into DPC latency, which in turn makes the audio interface loose packets and synchronization.

So finally the question to you: what is this something? Is it the way it wakes up a device which is turned off by power management?

And also, what would cause this something without HWiNFO's help? Because it might happen completely on its own, not only when I launched HWiNFO...

 

[Martin]

Well, this is not an easy question And very hard to determine for me, because I don't have direct access to that machine to perform tests.
Does this issue come up during you launch HWiNFO system scan, or sensor scan ? In case you use the Sensor-only mode, then disable it and watch which of those phases causes it. That would be at least a first starting point.
Next, I'd suggest to start disabling HWiNFO Safety options and see if you can find an option which when disabled doesn't cause the problem anymore.
Please let me know the results, then I might come up with another ideas

 

[captain.abstract]

Hi Martin!

I've just tried launching it in summary-only mode, with various safety options on and off, the result is the same.

To make things even more mysterious: I discovered the following (I'll try to describe it schematically, because too much words are not good for understanding, given that English is not my native language)

(wifi enabled in bios) AND (ethernet disabled manually in device manager) AND (hwinfo launched) = sound is OK
(wifi enabled in bios) AND (ethernet cable pulled out) AND (ethernet allowed to save power) AND (hwinfo launched) = glitch!
(wifi enabled in bios) AND (wifi disabled manually in device manager) AND (hwinfo launched) = glitch!
(wifi disabled in bios) AND (ethernet disabled manually in device manager) AND (hwinfo launched) = OK
(wifi disabled in bios) AND (ethernet cable pulled out) AND (ethernet allowed to save power) AND (hwinfo launched) = OK

man am I sure no-one is going to solve this puzzle )) there's a ghost in my machine.

 

[Martin]

Oh... I guess you're right.. This puzzle is just too crazy and complex
So I'm sorry, but this probably goes out of my knowledge...