Persistent brief, irregular interruptions in music

Hi, Apologies in advance for being a bit vague describing this. I'm using HP Pavilion desktop Windows 7, 64-bit, Intel i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz RAM 16 GB. I use Foobar2000 together with Sennheiser HD650 and Graham Slee 'Bitzie', but actually the problem has nothing to do with those (just added for background context). I never had any problem playing music from stored files in any format, or live from eg Naxos Muslc Library or You Tube, until about a month ago.

I had a crash of unknown cause and had to call in a professional. As a result of a lot of discussion and reading &c, I decided to completely re-arrange everything -- I put all my O/S, all programs etc on a newly installed SSD (Samsung 840EVO) as the 'C' drive, and put everything else on a new 'D' drive, HDD. Everything is working fine, very much faster.

However, whether connected with the above or otherwise (and it might be connected with several updates from Windows, NVIDIA graphics card, I don't know) whenever I play music or videos, whether from audiofiles or videos stored on my pc, or from websites such as You Tube, they play fine but unpredictably and every so often there's a very slight pause in the flow, fractions of a second, before the music or video continues perfectly. I compare it to a kind of hiccup. As you'll appreciate, this is a nasty problem when trying to listen to music. (I have temporarily transferred listening to a laptop which luckily I also use.)

I'm told by a friend that such problems can be a devil of a job to trace -- that it might for instance be due to some quite different program trying to start up, temporarily interrupting the audio or visual software, so I'm not asking you for a full solution here!

I'm really asking if you have any advice, suggestions as to where I can go, eg where to look on my computer for what's causing the problem?

I've done full malware / virus scans with 3 different anti-malware and anti-virus programmes, done a full defrag of the 'D' drive (but not of course of the SSD).

Hope you might be able to give me a pointer or two, as to the right direction to look.

Many thanks in advance

Brian

musicweaver [AT] btinternet [DOT] com

Interested to read your comments about windows and how your PC's only last 3 years. My mac is nearly 5 years running a business and still going strong. I do have upgradeitis though..

I have used both systems for music playback with a number of DACS (including the Bitzie) and find OSX to be the better platform. Audirvana really does sound better that Foobar. Not exactly a fair comparison as one costs around £70 and the other is free but it's well worth it imo.