Error with sound and video

There may be something simple I'm overlooking here, but recently I've noticed that audio on my computer (music, videos, games) every so often plays a glitchy sound, and the video and music lag for the same time period. It's an occurrence that happens fairly frequently but not predictably (i.e. there is no pattern to it at all). It's as if the audio "stutters".

It's not the fact that I'm running a lot of power-hungry programs (happens when, for example, five programs are running or only one); it makes no difference where the programs are stored (i.e. SSD or HDD) and, for that matter, I don't believe it's hardware-related at all as this does not happen on my parallel Xubuntu install; it's not due to lack of disk space nor running background processes.

Is there anywhere else I can look, and potentially fix this issue? It's not hugely detrimental to my work but it is becoming a mild-to-moderate annoyance whenever I do anything multimedia-related.

Note: It may also be related (but is a different set of symptoms) that when playing MS Solitaire Collection for long periods of time, the game will begin to freeze altogether for short periods of time, this time periodically and predictably and longer than any other game. "Long periods of time" is anything over about ten-fifteen minutes, and the freezing gets worse the longer I play.

Do you notice anything common when this happens?

I could imagine something like that happening (maybe not in your case) when the CPU and or harddisc are at their limit and you then want to play e.g. a movie with a high resolution.

Joergi said:

Do you notice anything common when this happens?

The only thing that these occurrences really have in common is that I'm using Windows, along with some media running. I've never seen the CPUs at their limit before.

I know this may sound strange, but can you describe the sound that is making when it freezes? I've had similar problems for a long time with my laptop and I've become quite knowledgeable in freezing sounds .

An electronic sound, low-ish pitched in nature (but not bass), rarely mimicking the (legitimate) sound that the computer is making at the moment it freezes. It's similar (but not identical) to the glitch sound made in this video Lone live in the Boiler Room - YouTube at 9'36", among other time points - listen for about a minute from that point onwards and you'll actually get a pretty good feel for it.

BlackOwl said:

An electronic sound, low-ish pitched in nature (but not bass), rarely mimicking the (legitimate) sound that the computer is making at the moment it freezes. It's similar (but not identical) to the glitch sound made in this video Lone live in the Boiler Room - YouTube at 9'36", among other time points - listen for about a minute from that point onwards and you'll actually get a pretty good feel for it.

And now I am listening to a Boiler Room set .

Anyway, I know what you mean. This happened to my laptop and it was caused by the graphics card being faulty. It was too powerful for its own good so I under-clocked it a bit to stop that from happening. It didn't have to me on Xubuntu as well unless I strained it with a game.

Here is the sound but with a permanent crash.

Yes! Pretty much that sound, only it happens for a fraction of a second and never leads to a crash.

I will certainly give that fix a try, but my graphics card was by no means high-end way back in 2011 so I doubt that it being overpowerful is the issue.

Well, underclocking didn't solve the problem. Any other ideas?

I am guessing you have tried reinstalling/updating audio/video drives? To me it sounds hardware or at least driver related.

Both, yes. Apparently I had the most recent drivers in both cases.