Laptop suddenly freezing & a sound error

I don't understand this. Everything was working fine.

I was just on Youtube and watching videos, as soon as I get there I notice a bad sound error. The sound keeps freezing up and getting stuck, which produces a horrible grinding sound. I have heard this sound before on other computers which is just a common error, but this is happening constantly now. It doesn't just happen on the Internet either, it is happening for all music, sounds, etc on the computer. ATM, sound is useless.

After I discovered this, I shutdown the computer. When I restarted, EVERYTHING was super slow. The sound error was still happening as well.

I noticed that the Aspire One seemed to be overheating. It was pretty hot. Not the hottest I've ever felt on a laptop, but it was hot. So I decided to let it cool off for a bit and see what would happen, maybe these errors are happening because of the overheating?

When I turned the laptop back on about a half-hour later, the errors were still happening. Then I decided to try uninstalling K-Lite incase this is some kind of ffdshow error. The uninstall did not help either, even after a restart.

I'm letting the laptop cool down once again. I will check in a few hours and hopefully everything will be alright. But I am not that hopeful, as I did let it cool down once before.

Please help. This doesn't sound good to me.

 

Looks like this was a virus afterall. I did a system restore and now everything works fine. I figured to do that after I opened the laptop again, and the problem still didn't go away. So that ruled out overheating.

What I don't get is how I would have got this virus. Is all I did was browse a few sites, mostly news-related. Even more odd is that most of them were casual sites that I go on every day, and I never get anything bad from them.