Why is the sound on my laptop failing?

Question

I recently got a new laptop, and the sound will work when turned on, and works for half an hour to an hour, the suddenly, stops.

Then, when restarted, works again.

When I try using the call feature on yahoo, it tells me my speakers are being used by another program, and that I should stop that program before I try again.

Arn't speakers supposed to be able to be used by all programs? And I can't figure what program this is anyway, cause when I stop every program except yahoo, it still doesn't work. :(

It's even weirder, cause this program doesn't appear until like 45min after I start up the computer.

Please help!! Thank you!

Answer 1

Let me guess, you have Windows Vista ?

Answer 2

windows vista, ugh :-(

why not switch over to linux, at least back to win XP?

anyway the immediate solution would be to reinstall the sound driver. Have you recently tried upgrading the sound driver? try rolling it back. (Right click on my computer-> properties->hardware tab->device Manager-> select the sound device and roll back driver)

that should solve the problem.