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Hi, I've been running WIn XP Professional Edition for a few years and about this year my computer has started acting funny.

It's been reformatted so its nothing along those lines.

It used to restart until we set "do not restart" so now it just goes to blue screen.

But anytime music, or video files. [any sites for the kids cartoonnetwork, nickjr, runescape] a loud crackling sound shoots through the speakers and you have to shut them off. THe computer freezes using paint shop pro or anything.

It seems to be fine if you're just reading stuff, but once you run anything as mentioned above it does that. Sometimes 5 mins after restarting, 50 times a day...

any ideas?

Welcome to PCHF

Ok, I'm gonna start with the obvious...have you tried a different sound card yet?

Could it be sound and not video?

My brother built this computer & its embedded with the motherboard so doing anything could get expensive. He said that probably wasn't it. [He built it, and works with computers so I'd trust him ] but I wouldn't know to go about switching a sound card.

A soundcard can still breakdown no matter who built the pc im afraid , and if it is an onboard soundchip then it can't be replaced. You could disable it and add an pci soundcard (pretty cheap possible) though.

But first let's have a look if its something else , can you uninstall the sounddriver and reinstall to see if that helps?

Also do you know what codecs you have installed , and how old they are?

And just to make sure , have you also checked for loose connections?
And are the speakers them selfs working ok? Is it possible to play music over them in an other way then what you mentioned , or is it possible to test them on an other pc?

How do I reinstall sound drivers? and how do I check what codecs I have? Its actually the computer not the speakers, the whole system freezes when this happens.

If you go to Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance/System/Hardware/Device manager then you can uninstall the driver there , reboot and let windows install the driver , or use the motherboard cd to reinstall. Or even better , get the latest driver from the manufacturers website.

You can have a look in add and remve programs to see if any codecs (packs) show up there.

But the whole system freezing seems to imply an heat or malware issue i think.
You can use one of these apps to check the heat:

http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php
http://mbm.livewiredev.com/




Can you post the error that shows on that screen?

And to check for malware problems , can you follow the instructions in the "Prework" link below and post the 2 resulting logs?

I used to have a similar problem on an older computer, in which my Audigy 2 ZS would cause my computer to freeze up and emit strange sounds out of my speakers. Possibly, try a more powerful powersupply, and disable any overclocking in the BIOS. This worked for me.