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Well, I think my computer overheated because i accidently left a bunch of shit laying all over it and when i tried to turn it on, it would say that "Operating system not found"... Then when I said screw it and wanted to format the thing and re-install windows, it said that no hard disks were detected...which was weird because I was just browsing the C: drive. Anyways, i took out the HDD, made sure all the cables were in nice and then I plugged it back in, then it finally worked. However, now whenever I play music or watch videos, it skips every now and then. It's not because i'm running anything because I could just be sitting there and it will do it. So it's not cuz my computer is too slow... and it's obviously not a software problem or nothing like that because i formatted and it still does it. So i figure it must be a hardware problem. Wondering what might cause the computer to skip like this... I'll try to describe the skips as best i can

they occur pretty much at random times...they used to occur every half a minute or so but now they are spread out here and there. and the skip is like...well if a song is playing and it does this "skip", it will like replay the part it skpped at a couple times and then it'll go normal again.

i've never had a problem with this and wonder if something god fried because it overheated or maybe my HDD has some damaged sectors on it or something. I'm not too sure how much more i can explain it.

I run XP Pro, 1.2 GHz, 128 Ram. not much else to add.

What sound card do you use and did you install updated drivers?

Did you install any XP service packs?

Which chipset and soundcard are you using? It sounds awfully like the Via chipset + Creative Soundblaster/Audigy problem to me. You might want to download George Breese's VIA PCI Latency patch if you have a VIA chipset.

128MB of RAM is a bit low for XP Pro. If your drive is fragmented or has errors, I can see where skips might be a problem.

First of all, I'd open up a command prompt window and run the following:

chkdsk c: /r

The machine will tell you that the drive cannot be locked for error checking, would you like to do this on your next reboot? Tell it yes, reboot, and then read a book while the system checks for errors. When everything boots back up, run a defrag of your hard disks to make sure you don't have some badly fragmented files. Once your disks are all defragmented, try playing your audio files again, and let us know what happens