Hard drives are cheap... 50cents a gig or less if you find a good deal. Do some math and figure out just exactly how old your current hard drive is, since it did comefrom your old computer. If it's getting up there in years, you might want to buy a new one and ghostyour HDcontents to it, and maybe that will solve the problem after all. It's clearly not the speakers or headphones or volume, it's some kind of performance hit. Check your background apps, check that your computer is set up for the appropriate speaker configuration, run a disk cleaner, but most importantly find a program to check your hard disk integrity and see whether it is failing.