WTF

How come my computer skips in videos and cursor movement? Every time this occurs, the next thing that happens is any music i'm currently playing slows down and skips ALOT when I launch Firefox.

The only remedy I've been using for this problem is re-installing windows. The problem comes back whenever it wants to. This time my video and cursor are skipping 4 days after I re-installed windows.

if XP "at some point" notices a lot of CRC/timeout errors it sets the HDD back to PIO and greys out the DMA option, so there is no easy solution by just reselecting DMA

use RUN->regedit and go to the entry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

now there are three things that MAY fix this

1. add EnableUDMA33 (or 66 or 100 etc) as DWORD and set it to 1
in the entry 0000

2. delete 0001, 0002 etc (doesnt do no harm, win just has to recheck and redetect the values)

3. add ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess as DWORD in 0001 or 0002 etc (whatever is the HDD, or just add it in all HDD entries if you got multiple HDDs)
and set it to 1

if that doesnt help...dunno
bios update, driver updates may help too
here is the MS article which ...does not help much
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/en