For a long time, I've been "putting up" with a bizarre issue with my laptop's soundcard.
No matter the drivers I use, or settings I tweak, the soundcard seems to keep falling asleep.
If you try to play a sound (via ANY media program/app/windows dialogue/etc) it'll "reboot" leaving a 1.5 second gap before it starts any audio.
Give it a 3 or 4 second delay of no-audio, and the soundcard seems to fall asleep again.

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This happens ALL DAY, and in the majority of cases it's ok, and manageable.
Running a game will activate OpenAL/Direct Sound, where the device stays awake until the game's quit.

But audio editing, video editing, playing with Vocaloid (which I was trying to do last night) and more, will all cause this delay to happen over and over and over and over again!
When you're tweaking notes down to the millisecond, and have to replay bits over and over, having a 2 second delay between "takes" can become very frustrating, and I just can't figure out how to stop it.

Except, last night, when I came up with a rather lazy bodged-job of a fix.

If you're experiencing a similar issue, here's a quick-lazy-fix to "deal with it".

Silence.wav

Yep, as simple as that.
2 hours and 40 minutes of absolute silence.
The entire wavefile being a bunch of zeros. (which, incidentally, compresses down really rather well!! )

Shove it somewhere handy, like your desktop, and find a nice simple wav player that will run in the background without getting in the way. Set that off, and then do all the audio based editing that you need to do, without the soundcard randomly going to sleep over and over and over again.

It's a lazy fix, but until the day that someone out there manages to fix the driver, it's enough for me.

Hurray for lazy fixes!