My computer's audio output is REALLY staticy. Help?

[Sofa King Kool]

I have absolutely no idea why my computer does this, but no matter what I'm listening to, it's full of pops and crackles. I know it's not my speakers, because I plugged in brand new headphones and I still got the static. I also know that the files aren't corrupted, because I can put them on my iPod and they sound great. So it has to be the computer itself. What could be causing this? An out of date driver? OR is my computer just starting to show it's age, (although, it's really not very old at all).

Any help is appreciated. I'm trying to record something for school, and I can't have it all full of static.

[Chacrana]

What kind of sound card are you using, and are you on XP or Vista?

[Sofa King Kool]

What kind of sound card are you using, and are you on XP or Vista?

XP, I have no idea what sound card I'm using. How would I go about finding out? I'm not very good with the technical aspects of computers...

[DrFoo]

Well to find out what sound card you are using look at the back of your computer. If you plug your speakers into the top, you are using on board audio (which is my guess). If you plug them into the bottom of the tower, you have a sound card. To figure out exactly what kind you have, click start -> run -> type dxdiag and press enter and look at the audio tab.

I was actually having the same problem when I first built my computer a month ago with my on board audio and I found a couple of methods that might fix this. First, go into control panel -> sound and audio devices (or something similar to that; I'm on Vista) and disable things like microphones and cd audio (it should become immediately apparent if this is causing it). For me, disabling this thing called PC Beep got rid of almost all the static except for this tiny bit which I got rid of by going to Start -> Run -> msconfig and then clicking the startup tab and disabling everything. After rebooting, all the static was completely gone. Hope this helps.