Random Audio Distortion

Hello!

Recently, I turned my PC into a hackintosh. It works great for what I need and all that but Mac sucks at the fun stuff like games. So I unplugged all my hard drives and added another to format for windows. So now I've got a dual boot system with MacOS on one hard drive and Win7 on another, plus like 3 other hard drives. Everything was working great but I decided to upgrade a hard drive on the mac side and a power supply. And after getting windows set up again on the same system, the audio will play for a few seconds then get all distorted like the system is spiking or something. But I've pulled up the system monitor and don't see anything going on in the memory or CPU stats.

I'm definitely confused as this system was working fine before the new PSU. To see if it was something related to the power, I switched to Mac and have no audio issues at all.

I've checked the audio driver and the only one available for it is from microsoft and that came with windows update (same as I did it originally)

I'm sort of stumped at this point and this is my only issue with the system! It'll still play battlefield bad company 2 and starcraft 2 relatively fine.

And just for reference my system specs are:

750 watt PSU from Antec
Q6700 Intel Quad core CPU
DG33tl Mobo
8 gigs of AData DDR2 800
Nvidia 8800 512 GPU
5 HDD's - 1 500 gig is the windows drive all the others are for the mac side


Any idea's would be great! Otherwise I guess I'll just try reformatting windows again and see if it'll work. Just a pain to get all the updates yet again...

Well I ended up trying to reformat again. This worked for a while and the audio was fine on the fresh install. But after I did updates my audio was getting all janky again. So I plugged in an old hard drive with a win7 install and created a back up to an external disk. Then loaded the win7 cd and did a complete restore on the new hard drive from that old back up.

So far so good, audio is fine and everything is good to go.

I remember Windows XP giving me problems with audio drivers back in the day as well. Maybe they should just leave audio drivers to audio manufacturers....

They usually do. For Windows Updates, hardware driver updates are listed as "Optional". Generally speaking, you should just do the Recommended updates as opposed to all. Leave the Optional components such as drivers and such alone. The only Optional ones I ever do have to do with either Framework or Windows Media Player.