Whenever i'm watching a video or playing a game on my PC every so often the audio and video will lag. I've searched various sources on the internet and most people say it's an issue with RAM or Processor speed. I have an Athlon 2 X4 processor with 12gb or ram and i'm running Win7.

What is it that causes the annoying audio lag is there a simple fix? I feel like what i'm missing is really obvious.

Stop downloading horse porn in the background.

@PulledaBrad: I'm not downloading anything.

Make sure you have the absolute latest drivers for your sound card.

It's not going to be anything wrong with RAM. If it was RAM the application would have crashed or the driver would have crashed possibly resulting in a blue screen.

If you are still having problems, I would recommend trying a different output device/jack. Perhaps using headphones plugged into the headphone jack on the front of the computer might yield different results. If you do have a sound card and on-board sound, you could try changing the default sound device in windows and try that.

Basically if drivers do not help, you need to start eliminating possibilities and trying different configurations to pinpoint the issue.

@TyCobb: Right now i'm using my Realtek onboard audio. The driver date is 6/19/12 which i believe is the driver i downloaded from the HP website.

I'm using standard speakers plugged into the headphone jack but i still get issues when i plug em into the back. I thought maybe using the HMDI sound from my video card would help but it's still a little glitchy.

Since its onboard audio, have you looked at updating your BIOS?

@Jedted said:

@PulledaBrad: I'm not downloading anything.

That's what they all say. And then someone finds the horse porn.

@Xolare: I'm seriously not downloading any porn while i play games.

@mosdl: i think my bios is up to date, at least i don't see any updates available from HP.

an athlon x2 and 12 freaking gigs of ram is a tad strange mix.

if this computer wasn't purpose built with something that needed huge amounts of ram in mind. i'd say that there is a chance that company or person might not have put it together properly.

for regular purposes, it just doesn't make sense, but then again, big numbers sell, so if its a brand computer, it wouldn't be that strange.

how long have you had this computer and how long have you had this problem?

it could be caused by a busy harddrive. you can check that by opening ther resource monitor in windows and check the disk tab.

the "active time" value is how busy the harddrive is. if thats hitting 100 all the time while you are gaming or watching a movie, that can cause the stuttering.

Format your harddrive. Google it. This sounds like a weird, random, problem fixed by a fresh install.

Then again I dont really know what you mean that the audio and video will lag. Will they lag behind, you mean? Out of sync of whats going on? In everything? No video in games, so do you mean you get low FPS?