Mm, when I play music or anything on WMP or Winamp I sometimes get this dzzzt dzzzzzzzt etc, it comes and goes and whilst it happens my mouse pointer thingie goes all jittery and everything, I must nearly always restart my PC during this. I have no idea what it is. I have formatted since I first had it so it is nothing on my HD. It would have to be something on my mobo or sound card but I am not sure at all. It also happens when I am not playing music and I get the jitter mouse freezing thing but say, I play a game or something I have no problems at all. It is a very funny thing and I could use some help, any ideas? Never had this kind of problem before at all and my PC components are not that old either. My guess is my motherboard is screwed or my sound card.

Do you have a mobile phone or any other source of microwave radiation near the comp?

no

If the CD and/or Line volumes are active mute them (known driver interference probs).

Swap the mouse to see if that is the problem (known radio interference problems).

Try moving the sound card to a different slot further away from the PS2 socket if it is not an onboard chip (known radio interference problems).

Make sure that all drivers are up to date.

Complicated: Check in Device Manager if the mouse and sound card are sharing an IRQ. If so,a separate IRQ, like IRQ5 needs to be assigned to the sound card.

If the problem only happened recently then check anything that was changed recently.

[ May 27, 2004, 02:25: Message edited by: Bluin ]

Ah, wait sometimes my drive (D) will disappear when I have restarted my PC after these problems. I wondered if it might be something to do with that, what should I do? The CD drive does come back after another restart though.

If it is a CD rewriter make sure you have the latest drivers for it.

Mute the CD volume in the volume control.

Disable the CD autoplay function. Some people report their mouse icon flickering between the CD and arrow icons even when there is no CD in the drive.

Some applications will browse your filesystem details even before you access the File Open dialogue. Windows does not always update your filesystem details when you remove non-standard CDs like music CDs. This can make an application (MP3 player etc) try to check the Volume Info of a CD that may no longer be in the drive. This in turn can make your machine freeze as the application vainly waits for the CD drive to respond.

Make sure that the CD drive connectors are secure (long shot).

Remove any file indexing programs like MS Office's Find Fast from your startup directory (long shot as nobody needs these).

I turned the volume thing all the way down. It fixed the problem or perhaps not. My CDRW, which I use for everything, has disappeared. It still appears to work, I see a light etc but it does not show up in my device manager or My Computer.

Have you upgraded to the latest version of MS Media Player? If not an online ActiveX exploit can cause your CD drive entry to dissappear. Installing the latest Media Player fixes this problem.

There should be a check-box to mute the CD Audio Input volume as opposed to turning it down.

If the CD Drive doesn't come back, check the connectors are secure on the Motherboard and CD Drive.

Installed WMP 9, muted and checked connections. Drive is still missing. Must I buy a new CDRW/motherboard or what?

If you are using XP and you recently unistalled CD writing software or other software then check this fix out.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314060

Also XP will sometimes complain about ATAPI comformity and not recognise older CD drives if a CD is left in the drive while booting. This is only relevant if the fault is intermittant and you would probably have noticed it long before now.

The drive could be dead, but you should try everything right up to and including doing a fresh install of the OS before you buy a new one.

[ May 28, 2004, 03:46: Message edited by: Bluin ]

Ah screw it might as well buy a new one. Thanks for your help.

umm, can I have the old one then? :D

Yes, it is in transit on the way to you right now.