Sound Card "Freezes" and skips

Hey all,

Just been having a problem with my sound card (it's actually one built into the motherboard). I'm sorry if I don't give enough technical information..just let me know if ya need more details.

Anyway, i'm experiencing a weird issue with my sound. Everytime i'm playing music or have the sound on..after a while, whatever is playing just stops and freezes and then starts to skip. For example, if i'm playing a song..after a while (sometimes hours and sometimes less) it'll just stop at a spot in the song, and then freeze at that spot and just continuously play that 1-2 seconds of the song over and over again. So basically, the sound card freezes after a while of use. And unfortunately the only way of getting it to stop or work right again is to restart the computer.

Now, I'm guessing it might be a bad sound card (although It's been doing this since I got the computer). When it started happening, I did try to update the drivers with no success so I don't think it's a driver issue. If it is a sound card issue, is it at all possible to do something to fix it so that I don't have to restart the computer everytime...like restart a process or service or something along those lines?? Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks!

 

When your playing music I would check the CPU usage and see if it spikes.

When it locks up does the sound just skip or the the entire computer lag out?

If it is the sound card you can get a PCI one for around $30

 

Hey,

Thanks for the response. I did what ya said and checked the CPU usage and there was nothing out of the ordinary. I have 6 gb of ram and a quad core processor so I don't think it'd be anything with that. Plus when I'm listening to music, I usually have nothing else open.

Also, it only happens to the sound. The computer doesn't lag or anything along those lines. Runs perfectly fine.

And yeah, I want to get a new sound card, but unfortunately I only have one PCI slot on the motherboard (I know, ridiculous) and that's being used by my graphics card. I can definitely live with it but I'd really like to find a way to at least fix it when it happens and not have to restart the machine each time.

 

Hi

Have you tried reinstalling the sound drivers? The drivers may have corrupted somehow.

To reinstall them, go into Device Manager, and uninstall all sound drivers (everything to do with your sound, right click, select uninstall). Then, shut down the computer, and start it again (instead of simply rebooting). Windows should install all sound drivers again.

 

If this is on the board, you have a sound chip. Since it doesn't happen immediately, it is probably heat related. A bad trace on the motherboard that shows up after the board heats up.
Buy a sound card. Install it and see if the sound issues go away.

 

Installing a new sound card could also eliminate the issues if the original sound drivers are corrupted... but reinstalling them is free, and I believe should be the first step in troubleshooting the issue. It's fixed similar hardware issues for me in the past.

I personally think that motherboards shouldn't have "onboard" graphics and sound, and they should miniaturize and cheapen normal sound cards, so if the sound card (or onboard component) goes out, it's not a matter of replacing the entire motherboard. Same with graphics... but I'm sure they won't change in the near future.