Sorry for bringing up an old post, just bought this player and am reading through the thread. I had to comment as I had this issue with any DAC I use with a Dell laptop that I have for work. It's one of the business class latitude laptops, but any in that series do the same thing. I think it has to do with how terrible the USB implementation is on Dell computers, especially the less expensive ones. I've had problems with a GoPro on it and other co-workers have had all sorts of connectivity issues with them. I have no idea what Dell is doing with the massive amount of bloatware and weird proprietary stuff that they have, but it's really weird to see that it happens on any OS you install, which certainly means it's the Dell hardware that's doing it, not their software, which was my thought for a while.
In my journey through trying to fix it, I bought power conditioners and filters, different USB storage, different players, all sorts of stuff. Nothing ever worked. It would just crap itself once in a while for no reason. Once I bought an iBasso DX80 for portable use and plugged it in over coax, it was a revelation and all of the pops went away and the background became black as night, which made the whole frequency response seem more balanced and clean. Unfortunately, my DX80 was stolen and I've been looking for another affordable DAP to take it's place, which this one does with a USB-C to coax cable that I also ordered. If ony I could charge it at the same time...