My audio starts to periodically skip. Sometimes it starts after one day, sometimes after a few days. When it skips, the audio, and the application playing it (Winamp, YouTube, MPlayer, etc), hangs for about 20 ms and resumes.
The skipping is always at regular intervals, sometimes as close as 2 s apart, sometimes as much as 4 seconds in between.
While in this state, when I record audio with a recording program, it occasionally, but randomly, hangs for more than a whole second, and then it shows to have recorded that amount of time as silence.
This problem only started recently after I re-installed Windows (from the same CD no less).
The only solutions I've found is rebooting or going into and out of stand-by.
I already have the newest audio driver, which is a horribly old driver because DELL dropped the Windows XP support for my four-years-old laptop. It's a "Sigmatel High Definition Audio" device (I cannot find a type number).