I have a Presario 5000 with a 750 MHz Duron CPU, 320 MB RAM, an ATI Sapphire 64 MB graphics card, and a FIC AZ31 mobo with an on board sound card. I ran Windows XP for about 4 months with no problems then I repartitioned my hard drive and reinstalled XP and now the boot screen runs fine for about half way then its slows down dramasticaly untill you press enter then runs fine.(kinda wierd) Otherwise it boots fine and runs fine untill I play audio and it skips horribly and I have noticed that may of the times it skips the light on the CD-ROM is flashing. In addition the mouse sometimes jumps when running very few progams (maybe IE and AIM) and out of the blue a "autoplay" box appears with a progress bar for a few seconds. I know this is alot of symptoms but the whole problem is very annoying and confusing. Please Help!!

I have no idea what could be wrong with your installed copy of windows, it sounds really nuts. I'd do a re-install...

Some things could be causeing the symoptions, excluding the boot up thingy. Thats really odd - says alot too (ie: your installed copy was messed on installation).

That all I could figure too. Do you think there is anything that i could do differently during the install?

Boot to your WinXP CD, and from inside setup, remove the partition, re-add it, then format it, then reinstall. See if that works. Let us know what happens.

Also, a few more details would be helpful to me personally. Such as the directory that you are installing WinXP to (are you installing to the C: drive?).

This kind of problem can really be a headache which means your going to have some work to do so I would expect not being able to use that PC comfortably until you get the problem fixed. We will help you in any way we can, but if you will, please give what I just described a try and if your having the same problem afterwards let me know.

Good luck.

it sounds like DMA is not enabled on your optical drives so when you are playing your music via the drive it skips and the CD rom is having trouble keeping up that si why the light is flashing.

go to cevice manager and check to make sure that DMA is enabled. more than likely your going ot find that the drive is operating in PIO mode

You could have some corrupt files. At the run command type sfc /scannow to run the system file checker and check for corrupt files. There are some other things that you can try if that doesn't work, but check your files first.

A few things that I'm seeing that you might find interesting, but might also find totally useless.

1. Check your CDs. Are they clean and mostly scratch free? Some drives are very picky about this, and it's easy to overlook minor things if you've had other drives/players read things fine. A CDR might not read in old drives, as well as copy-protted CDs can fail to work in quite a few different situations.

2. For your mouse skips and jumps: That sounds like the CPU maxing out, for probably no reason other than being windows. In the past I've found iarsn's TaskInfo as a very useful tool. It shows processes which don't show up in the task manager and shows threads. Because of the amount of detail it gives in a nice, organized manner, it's wonderful for determining the likely source.

iss's advice of DMA sounds very good to me, as does checking your windows install. Windows loves to hose up wherever it can, even in an install.

Hope this helps, and welcome to TS!