Amazingly, i blew out the fans a little bit and a big clump of dust blew out. I haven't experienced the problem since. Thanks alot everyone and I hope you all fix yours too.

I am now having the same problems... it's REALLY irritating.

I didn't start having the problem until I installed the new drivers from www.sagernotebooks.com for my NVIDIA card.

When playing DDO and BF2 I will hear that strange glitchy noise and then my fps will take a HUGE dive.

I went through installing/uninstalling 8 different drivers hoping that that was the problem. The installation of the new driver seemed to start the problem but reverting back to my old ones didn't fix it.

I've got a sager 9880 btw

Do I really have to send it to sager? I'm at college and the box to ship it in isn't with me so it would be a bit harder...

have you tried cleaning it out?.. after about a month these things get all clogged with dust... and alot of times you cannot see the dust when you remove the panel... you have to try blowing it out before the dust is apparent...

Yeah I just cleaned it out and put it back together, but now when I start it up it seems to take longer than usual... also it's not recognizing my usb in one of my ports even though the USB is said to be functioning correctly.

Just a quick update from my end; have been having this problem on and off now for a few months and finally got sick of it after my computer wouldn't boot. I called PC Torque support and they gave me a number of suggestions, which I stepped through in this order:

1) Remove the battery to alleviate / mitigate possibly power distribution issues
Only helped the no booting issue. The machine-gun audio/video issues remained. I put the battery back in after playing for a few hours and it looks like the [lack of] booting problem is gone.

2) Check the power cable for a loose connection
The power cable is about as tight as it can get; not bent nodes and when I have the machine-gun audio/video issue I Alt-Tab to see if it has shifted to battery power. It has not. Logical conclusion: This is not the issue

3) Apply a new layer of Arctic Silver to the CPU/heat-spreader contact point
After much research into how to do this correctly, I decided to get around the necessity and time-cost of RMA and do it myself. Removing the heat sink was a bear, I'll tell you that now. Removing the old Arctic Silver and applying the new stuff fixed my problem 100%. My machine is running like new again, so it can logically be concluded that my issue was caused by inadequate CPU heat dissipation. Problem solved.

I'm not going to tell anyone how to take apart the heat sink, remove old Arctic Silver layers, or apply new ones. If people try to do this and screw it up it will only come back on my head since - to my knowledge - it voids your warranty. The Sager user's manual specifically avoids any discussion of removing the heat sink for this reason.

The information on how to do this is out there on the internet and is plentiful, so have a go at searching.

Happy gaming everyone.

im a bit late, but check the bios for "Turn on after power failure"

beside the sensible comment about the arctic silver i can not really agree with the (it seems this days universal solution of the mobo went bad). i have several sagers and yes also several 9860ies, usually it is the as5, dust clogging the vents or cpu hog software running in the back. often enough also just "shitty" compiled software that just starts filling up your memory. programmers this days are just lazy sob's - since machine power goes up and up and memory cheap (and accordingly there is more in machines) the quality of code writing goes down the drain .

I had the same exact problem with my 9860. While playing ANY 3D game for a bit this problem would start happening. It's cyclical, I got the sound glitch and then poor fps, then about 1 min later, sound glitch and smooth fps again, then it would reoccur about 5-10 minutes later. Also had the same phenomenon where the fans would ratchet down in speed like everything is being way less taxed and so it doesn't need the same amount of cooling, as a poster above said, "sorta like it was taking a rest." I performed most if not all of the troubleshooting mentioned above and even completely reinstalled Windows XP. After the reinstall it seemed to be OK for a few days then right back to having the same issue. Finally after about a month of this I started having the boot problems which pointed to a MOBO failure. The machine eventually died all together and now I have a big silver 15 pound paperweight. I'm now about to send the entire machine back to Sager for a MOBO replacement. Hopefully all will be well after that. So, word to the wise, if you're having this problem and you're still under warranty, SEND IT IN! This all happened to me 1 month after my warranty expired. I'm betting it IS related to the "known issue" of MOBO failure in these machines.