DPC Latency

If you're experiencing seemly random stalls in audio processing, one of the first things you should check for is Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) Latency. DPC latency is caused by poorly written system level drivers and is particularly troublesome with some notebook wireless networking drivers.

DPC Latency can be checked with this simple checker tool by TheSysCon.

Download the tool and follow their instructions to check and isolate badly behaving drivers on your system

Note: this is also a good test to run on a new PC before you buy it!