Scrambled sound on laptop, but iTunes OK?!

[spinpug666]

All my system sounds, internet browser, youtube, etc all sound like a scrambled mess that sounds like no relation to what it should sound like. eg. not distorted.

When i play music through iTunes it's perfect!!!!! But everything else is fecked.

I dont think that its a hardware problem with my sound card.
Any ideas as to what the problem is?

BTW its a Toshiba Equium M70-173 laptop, circa 2005

[randombs]

If it's running Windows XP, try right-clicking the little speaker in the bottom-right taskbar and choose 'Adjust Audio Properties'. If there's no speaker, go to Control Panel and look for 'Sounds and Audio Devices'.

Once in there, at the bottom of the window it should have a 'Speaker Settings' section. Click the 'Advanced' button there. In the 'Advanced Audio Properties' window, click the 'Performance' tab and set Hardware Acceleration to 'none' and see what happens.

It sounds to me like some buffer-related nonsense or maybe it needs the driver reinstalling. A friend had the same problem although we didn't try iTunes. Unfortunately, his laptop was in such a mess I didn't bother sorting the sound out and told him to just reformat and reinstall Windows but it seemed like some software or driver issue, not hardware. Looking at Toshiba's site, your laptop has Realtek audio which may or may not rely on the processor to help it out. If that's the case, it could be because whatever you're playing is taxing the processor too much. I'm just throwing ideas around right now, though, but try opening Task Manager and see what the CPU usage is like.

Perhaps iTunes does some funky business to play sounds or sets a big buffer or something which is why it's working fine for you?

Did some big change occur recently that made it happen, like installing a newer Windows?