I had finally had enough of a very annoying clicking noise through the headphones on my HP Pavilion dm1 Netbook. I love this machine because of its compact size and long lasting battery. The system originally had Windows 7 witch was a struggle with just an Atom processor. I fell in love with Xubuntu on this machine immediately with one slight annoyance. Every 10 seconds there was a click in the audio. This only happened when there was no audio playing. It also went away when the audio mixer was open but why waste the ram keeping it open?
Solution was simple enough. Power save kept switching the Intel sound card on and off every 10 seconds causing the click. Solution? Turn it on and leave it on! Here are the steps.
First, open a terminal window.
sudo nano /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/intel-audio-powersave
Comment out the following line with a #.
# INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=${INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE:-true}
And then add the following line below the pervious line.
INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=false
Save the file and reboot the computer. That is it, no more click!