I am having serious problems with the sound on my laptop. After listening to no more than 5 minutes of music or watching a video, my sound wil stop working. It simply cuts out and every once in a while I hear a fuzzy distorted sound. Once my sound goes I have to restart my computer for it to work again. When the sound goes, other problems often arrise. My web browser may freeze momentarily or my mouse will freeze. I've noticed that this problem occurs more rapidly when I am using multiple programs at the same time (webbrowser + aim + windows media player for example). My computer is new. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to fix this annoying problem?

Did you run an antivirus and antispyware scan lately ?? And when you connect to the internet .. do you use a firewall ?