I had this toshiba labtop since 2002, the sound card works well until recently. Most of the time, the video/sound quality would lag only a little when there are other applications running; however, lately the sound would muffle, skipps, stops and from time to time play at an amazingly low speed. An time spend of one second for the music player would be three seconds in actually time. I have tried to fix this problem myself, but had no luck. I already tested the system for sound, and everything works (so the system check displayed). I even looked for update for the sound card driver (Avance AC97 Audio), but only found no updates. I thought maybe it is because of a background program that is running at the same time while my music player is trying to play the sound. If anyone have the same problem, or knows how to fix this, it would be great.

1. disable unwanted application from the start up (start > run > msconfig) 2. disable unnessecary windows services (start > run > services.msc). here's a service tweaking gguide: http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/winx... 3. check your computer for malware by running applications like: housecall, ewido, spybot, etc. 4. consider a 'music player' that doesn't use much system resources (i.e. foobar2000, evilplayer) Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575