iconoclast

Hey guys, I just started experiencing this problem last night and I've tried to fix it, and at some times it seems like the problem is gone but then I'll do something else and it'll come back.

Anyways basically I was listening to my itunes last night, and all of a sudden the songs started to cut out...like the sound would go dead for a few seconds, and then come back...so I switched songs, thinking maybe it was just a problem with the mp3 file. But it did that with all the other songs I tried playing too, so I was like okay well something is definitely wrong here. So I closed my itunes and reopened it and tried playing music again, but this time the sound was totally :filtered:ed up...its like it was lagging really really badly...I can't think of how to describe it...like it would take 10 seconds to play 2 seconds of the song, and it was really spread out and sounded all choppy and stuff, I'm not sure. So I figured maybe it was an audio driver...so I downloaded the latest windows xp realtek audio driver and installed it, and rebooted my pc, and it seemed like it had fixed it because I tried playing another song, and for the first 15 seconds it was fine, but then it started doing this really laggy thing again.

Anyways right now I'm just kinda :filter: that my sound is being all funky, and I'd really like to see if I could fix this somehow...do you think this could be due to some virus/spyware issue at all? Also, I'll tell you this, I dunno if it makes any difference or not but basically I leave my computer on all the time downloading things like movies and tv shows using uTorrent, and usually its fine and fast and whatnot, but ever since this whole audio problem happened its been acting really laggy as well, like when I start it where it would usually take a few seconds to check the overall progress of the download it takes upwards of 15 minutes...no idea if that has anything to do with anything but I figured I'd throw it out there just in case because I noticed that as well.

I'd really appreciate it if someone could try and help me fix this sound problem though, thanks!!

Lydokane

Have you performed a virus scan lately? P2P downloading can be a magnet for trouble like virus and malware.

Also, have you tried to play MP3s in anything other than iTunes?

Lydokane

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iconoclast

Yeah actually I ran Spybot, Adaware, SuperAntiSpyware and KasperskyAV all yesterday and it found a few things which I removed, but its still doing it.

Plus it's not as if this is only happening with music...any sound my computer tries to play does this, whether its a movie or people signing into msn or whatever.

Also I rebooted my computer several times and its taking a REALLY long time to load all the startup things, I mean it wasn't exactly fast before but its extremely slow now, I rebooted it this morning and it must have taken about 10 minutes or more for everything to load.

Any more ideas?

Lydokane

At this point I would run msconfig and disable all start up programs and stop all services (except Microsoft services). See how long it takes to reboot. How is the sound working?

Lydokane

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iconoclast

It's still being all weird. The thing is, sometimes it sounds normal, like, when people are signing into msn it sounds fine, and my screensaver which is an aquarium with bubble noises sounds fine, but when I go to play a song it'll play like the first 10 seconds and it'll sound normal, and then it'll go into this gnarly lag that sounds like absolute garbage =/

iconoclast

If I backed up all my files to my external hard drive(s) and formatted my laptop's hard drive and reinstalled Windows, would this fix this problem do you think?

Lydokane

So long as the problem is software and/or operating system related then yes this could solve your problems.

If your problem is hardware related then no. Have you opened the case lately and checked the dust content? Before you go to the trouble of a format & Windows install you should get some canned air and clean out the PC. Pay special attention to the CPU/heatsink/fan, the RAM, and the PSU. If you have a heatsink/fan on the video, make sure that is clean as well.

If you already have cleaned out your PC then one other step you could try is to look into the sound card. Is it integrated with the motherboard? If it is not integrated and you can remove the card; try a different PCI slot or try to swap it out with another card if you have one available.

You might also want to run memtest86 to test your RAM. You mentioned in your original post that networking and the internet was lagging as well. This could be a symptom of faulty RAM.

Please answer:
Since you have shut down all non-MS services and stopped all startup programs; does your PC start up any faster?

Have you tried to leave the PC off for a while? Try and shut it down and leave it off for a half hour or more then boot up and see if problems start immediately. If problems take a while to crop up then that could be a hardware issue as well.

Lydokane

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Lydokane

I just realized that we/you are working with a laptop here. My Bad. Obviously you can't pull the sound card and you can't blow out the dust.

I THINK you can run memtest though. Let us know the results and please don't forget to answer the two questions at the end of the above post.

Sorry for the confusion.

Lydokane

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sPiN87

I have the same problem, on a 1 year old Sony Vaio VGN-N31M.

The audio lags heavily, not only on mp3 playback, but also on EVERY sound the computer does, like people going online in MSN. I have run defrag, scandisk, NOD32 and Kaspersky, Ad-Aware, CCleaner and TuneUp diagnostics tools, all to no avail. This is the second laptop I have seen this happen on, and after searching online, I found out this problem, although not too often, happens to every other laptop user. I suspect it's either faulty hardware (God save me if it is) or dust accumulation.

My last resort will be, eventually, a complete format of the HD. Any other suggestions are accepted...