Sound Driver

Well I recently reformatted my laptop and everything went great except for the sound.
The sound works great 90% of the time but it occasionally goes scratchy. Usually after 10 minutes the scratchyness goes away. Not sure why this is happening. Im using a creative sound blaster x-fi sound card for my laptop on vista.
If I remove my sound card and plug it back in it fixes the problem but it still comes back later on.

 

Since you're using an external audio device on a laptop, you should disable the on-board audio in the BIOS if possible, and/or the Device Manager. There may be a conflict in there. Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I recently did a fresh/clean Vista install on a laptop, and Vista installed its own audio drivers. The sound worked fine, but every so often there would be a static-like 'POP!' It would happen at random and it didn't matter if there was any sound being played or not; the POP! would still happen even if the PC was idle at the desktop. Installing an updated sound driver from the laptop maker's web site got rid of the POP! so maybe this is somehow similar to your situation, at least on a tech level... or maybe not....

 

Alright i disconnected the on board sound card with device manager and it did no good.

Also I discovered one more thing. This sound issue only comes up when I stream audio or video online. So if I am watching something on youtube it will happen eventually.
I do not face this issue when I am using itunes or whatever else that does not require to be streamed but the second I watch a youtube video it usually happens.

Of course if I plug in my speakers to the internal sound card this issue doesn't occur.

Any ideas?