system : 64 bit win 7 laptop

Problem 1 : Most games have sound problems. What typically happens is that the game freezes for a second or more before loading a new sound effect for the first time. Problems with music/dialogue being stuttery are also common. How exactly the problem manifests differs from game to game: in some games the gameplay itself freezes only to resume once the sound effect manages to play (1-3 second freeze typically), and in others it's just the music/sound that stutters or lags behind the gameplay. Usually it's the former and often it makes the game unplayable. Thinking at first that it was a hardware/software fault with the sound card, I updated the drivers and even used a different soundcard (usb dongle that came with some new headphones), but to no avail.

Solution 1 : Another problem I had, which I thought was separate, was that when playing media files with MPC, seeking took an annoyingly long time. Media files play normally otherwise, but once you try to skip to another point in the file there can be a very long delay. Then one day I was copying files between my harddrive and external and for some reason decided to play some of the media files directly from the latter. Lo and behold, no seeking problems of any sort. That is when I thought it might be a hard drive issue, so I tried installing games that were giving me problems directly on my external. And ..... problem solved! No more sound issues!

Question : Since I'm more than completely fed up with this sound problem that has hounded me for more than a year, I'm now running all games from my external, a 500gb seagate. Compared to my laptop's hard drive, will this severely shorten my external's life span?

I don't have a question about the next problem, except perhaps why it works, but seeing as I've often seen people experiencing this problem in the forums, I thought I'd share my solution.

Problem 2 : In some games, typically older ones like Sudden Strike and Abe's Oddysee, when starting the game I get a black screen but with music and sound effects in the background. Moving the mouse or using the keyboard I get the appropriate sound effects as I navigate the menu and submenus. So the game appears to be running perfectly, it's just that it's hidden behind a black screen. Alt+tabbing and going back into the game replaces the black screen with a frozen image of where you are in the game at that point : that is, either a freeze frame of the menu, or of the game if you somehow managed to start a new game 'in the dark'.

Solution 2 : Trying to capture the problem I was experiencing I installed bandicam to record it, only to find the problem solved as long as bandicam was recording. The game runs perfectly, at the same rate as the capture rate in bandicam's settings. I have no idea why this works. Bandicam isn't ideal though since the free version only captures 15 minutes at a time, and 15 minutes worth of gameplay isn't enough. Instead OBS Studio solves the problem in exactly the same way. Even better, it only needs to be configured to be ready to record/stream. It doesn't actually have to record/stream. Just opening it and starting the game does the trick. One thing however, it doesn't work on my power saving gpu : Intel(R) HD Graphics. I have to set it to the stronger Radeon gpu.

Hypothesis: Your laptop has a mechanical hard drive rather than an SSD. The power management options on the laptop are set to stop the harddrive when a certain amount of time with no reads or writes has gone by, in order to save power. As a result, when your game needs to load something new into memory, there is a delay while the hard drive spins back up again. The same thing happens with media files. The player caches the next bit of the media stream ahead of time and stops reading the file when its buffer is full. When you skip, you move outside the buffered part, and again you have to wait for the drive to spin up.

Actual solution: Go into your power management options and tell Windows not to stop the hard drive after so short a while, at least when the machine is powered externally rather than running on the battery.

For your second issue, it sounds exactly like what I experienced just a couple nights ago with Blackwell Legacy. The solution for this was to change the compatibility to Windows XP service pack 3 (I'm using Windows 10). Then it worked like a charm.

Have you tried looking at the Windows Event Viewer?

It may give you an idea of what's causing the problem if errors are being thrown, they'd probably show up in Windows Logs / System section. That helped me track down a few issues with my laptop.

Yep, it is indeed a mechanical drive. I'm attempting to try out your solution but seeing as I've moved everything to my external I first have to try and replicate the problem again. I'll get back to you thanks :) Windows event viewer? That sounds a bit like something above my paygrade to be able to interpret sensibly :) I do remember disabling the log entirely or partially recently to solve a weird problem in some game, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.

Yeah it's pretty difficult to interpret the errors that show up in there.

But it can give you something to google if you notice a pattern of errors after playing a game or watching a media file.

Tried it again just to be sure, but unfortunately that doesn't work for me.

Hmmm, so you're saying the stuttering only happens when sound effects are involved and just then?

Well, it might be a long shot, since I've never heard of this happening on Win7, but I did have a similar problem back in the day on WinXP, although in some aspects it was even worse (at least for a gamer like myself). Every time I played a 3D accelerated game, my sound would occasionally stutter and framerates would drop at the same time.

After a long time of trying to figure out what the problem was, and to be honest I also thought it might be a hardware issue, but both the graphics and sound board turned out to be just fine, I noticed that for some reason the idiotic BIOS and/or WinXP drivers assigned the same IRQ channel to both. In essence, they were sharing the same IRQ - of course this is not unheard of or tragic in general, however for high-performance stuff like I/O and graphics it can be problematic.

My solution back then was to move the sound board from its PCI slot to a different one, and indeed that somehow caused the BIOS to allocate it a new IRQ, with the problem going away in a heartbeat.

I'm not expecting the issue to be the same in your case, but do have a look over how your BIOS/OS is configuring the devices. In 99% of the cases it will do a good job of resolving conflicts, but sometimes it will just make things worse and you need manual intervention to get things going back on track.

I'll have a look thanks, but like you said I don't expect it to be the same issue. I didn't have the problem when I got the laptop. And the problem persisted even after I recovered the system from a recovery partition. That is, pretty much a factory reset didn't solve the problem.