Logizomechanophobia

Well now videos won't play on my computer at home. All of a sudden. Out of the blue.

The only two things I did recently would be removing my sound card and using the onboard sound device (my sound crackles when I move the mouse and there is constant, faint feedback all the time. I'm sure it's a hardware address conflict but I can't find it); and deactivating Windows Firewall since I thought it might be conflicting with my router's firmware firewall.

So maybe I had an intrusion and there's some spyware infesting my PC. I tried S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and it ran just fine, even in combat, on full graphics just like before, with no stuttering at all. Videos, no matter what the player or whether they are HD or not, stutter horribly. And I can't seem to figure out why.

I tried plugging the sound card back in and deactivating the onboard sound device but to no avail. My graphics card seems to be fine (like I said, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was not complaining), the sound card doesn't seem to be effecting it, I've got plenty of RAM, more than enough HDD space...

I just cannot think what the problem might be. I even set all my BIOS options back to their default values to make sure nothing in there had changed recently but the problem still persists. I'm at a loss and this is really irritating me. It's a brand new, high spec' computer with no illegal or "shortcut" software on it (that I know of) and still it manages to fall over.

A few days ago it was freezing if I spent more than two minutes in IE, Firefox, or Windows Explorer. The problem seemed to solve itself. I've run an AVG anti virus scan but I'm thinking perhaps I should run Spybot Search and Destroy or something.

I wouldn't mind so much but I have to deal with computers going wrong all the time at work. My home computer is there for recreation, not more work.

On top of that, MyFavatar has disappeared off the face of the Earth. I was using their favicon hosting service for both this blog and my website but suddenly the service is not there. Sure it was free but it's still very annoying.