Husband says that Larry's right on that post below, disconnect from the net, etc. Before defragging you should run the scan disk on 'Thorough' option and it will check your hard drive for any damaged clusters or lost data. If it finds a cluster that it cannot write to, it will mark that cluster that it can't be used... read the information, tag that block/cluster so that it can't be used again.. and so on.

How old is the hardware? What kind of CPU?

As for the sound problem, if you have the Windows disk or the driver disk that came with the sound card, go into your 'Device Manager' through your control panel system icon and look for any multimedia devices. If they're not installed properly, there should be a yellow or red mark by them. If there is, then delete those lines, yellow and/or red, and re-start your pc, the Add Hardware Wizard should come up saying that it has found a new device, that should be your sound card. It will then ask you where to search for the drivers... choose CD ROM, insert your Windows Disk, it should then find the right drivers for the sound card.

Shane
-Marcia's husband and pc geek. Marcia took dictation. :)