I'm using the onboard audio and have the lastest driver that I need from RealTek. So there shouldn't be a problem from there. It's hard to determine the problem because most of the time the mp3 would play for hours and there's others where it would crash all audio/media software. It's not that the files are bad because it would happen to avi, mp3 and even the games that's being played would cut out and crash. It's so random that these things happen. It just makes it harder to isolate the problem. One day I could watch Window Media play a movie for 45 mins. until it crash. Than there's others where I watch the same movie and it would crash in 30 mins. Worse comes to worse, I'll have to reformat the computer and start off fresh.