Sound Error on Laptop

It is fixed for now, but the problem is a lot more complicated.

Ok so I forgot to mention that this happened before. The sound started messing up as mentioned couple months ago, and then the comp started freezing up and blue screening. So I did a system restore to a date prior to any of the issues and things were fine.

Fast forward to a couple days ago and sound issues start again. I think it is the driver and I update it, but then the comp starts freezing and running REALLY slow(it takes less than 30 secs for startup normally, it took 3-5 minutes). So I tried doing a restore again, but everytime I did and the comp restarted it said "could not restore". So I loaded the computer on safe mode and did restore and things were fine.

Now this is the 2nd time I needed to restore should I be worried? I dont really do anything crazy to get viruses. I have virus protection, ad-block, noscript, etc. I do stream videos and tv a decent amount(sports games, etc) and I use my laptop as a wireless access point for my XBox 360.

Do any of those things cause viruses?

For the Xbox I bridged my ethernet port with the wireless to allow the xbox to connect via my laptop.

This is on a laptop? Do you keep it running pretty much all of the time?

Open up the task manager (ctrl + alt + del OR start > run > taskman) and while you're playing audio or streaming, check your resource usage, particularly the CPU/Processor)

what type of laptop? a lot of toshibas, hp's, etc etc overheat easily and it'll basically kill the processor from overheating, this happens mostly for people that keep theirs on quite a bit, I've seen some that got bad enough that even typing in word the computer would have to catch up to the typing

hopefully that's not it, make sure you have the audio device drivers updated from the manufacturer's website, and if they make it worse, roll them back through device manager