etbll87

my last two pc's skipped on the audio
every ten seconds or so i have tried new speakers, and speaker cables,
new music files is this an electrical problem?
i thought that when i bought my new pc

i am stumped any suggestions would be great

thanks,

smz

To start, what motherboard are you using? The most common onboad sounds makers are Realtek & Sigmatel and occasionaly creative labs.

Or are you using a 3rd part PCI/USB Sound card.

There are a number of factors to be considered. What speed is your machine. I will tell you one way for sure to mess up your audio. I you have an older AMD CPU, and installed any software that helps cool your CPU and it uses the S2 cooling state. All I can say is look out. My first thing to recommend is the latest drivers from the sound chipset makers. forget about their bundled mixer, etc. the drives are important. Also directx 9c or 10 should be installed. I see Vista on your profile so you should have one or the other. A good test if you are using the onboard sound is to pop in a 3rd party card and see if there's a change assuming you have one laying around.

Need a bit more info of your setup to make any suggestions.

Scott

etbll87

I dont know this info about motherboard. i didnt know that there was software that could cool a cpu i thought that was what fans were for.
I didnt build this pc so i dont but could find out maybe.
anyway why are you asking these questions? It not the pc is it because i
did use a "third party sound card" when i swithched to a new pc.

smz

Well you asked a question and did not indicate a 3rd party sound card was involved. One must assume you are talking about onboard sound since nearly every motherboard made now includes it. Of course with a third party solution, I strongly recommend disabling the onboard sound in bios. Not just device manager. Fans are great though they don't normally have brains without a sensor and furthermore my example was before the modern introduction of Intel's speedstep and AMD's cool & quiet which essentially lower the multiplyer of the CPU and voltage in an effort to keep the CPU cooler and not needing the fans to run at full throttle. My abit hardware monitor lets the user control the threashold's of the temperature/fan speed. On a side note, without knowing more information of your rig, it is hard for any of us to have an opinion that is close to being conclusive. So at this point, my standard recommendations are to goto the sound card makers website and get the latest drivers. if your sound card is using something like the realtek chipset, the most modern drivers are on http://www.realtek.com.tw - I also recommend the latest directx be installed/upgraded. While our at it. Get to the run command on the start menu and type "dxdiag" without the quotes and go through the sound card test. See if there is any of the skipping you are referring to during the test. Make sure you note if certain tests skip and others don't.

SMZ