One day you turn on your computer, start boot into Windows and discover a brand new problem, right from the time the Windows loading bar showed up. Booting Windows seems to take longer than last time. Start-up (after the boot, before the desktop is shown) is very slow. Windows start-up sound is being very choppy. Mouse pointer skips a lot when you move it around. Any video or music that you play becomes choppy. Basically, the whole computer just freezes, doing the two points above and more, for fraction of a second, every 5-10 seconds. If this is your case, there's only one definite solution to this problem. For your reference, I found it in this page: Odd XP Problem: Audio and Mouse Skipping and Jittering / Overall system slowness - Hardware Discussions - FiringSquad Forums The Prescription (what you need to do): In Start Menu (or on Desktop), right click on My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager . (Or you can also right click on My Computer >