Pro: installed to my SSD as a "flash device" painlessly, boots! Con: sound is choppy on youtube videos, with a fast connection. some background: Greetings, I have dabbled in various Linux offerings for the past 15 years off and on, mainly on very old desktop workstations that were on their way out to the dumpster. I used them in various locations to offer internet to whomever was working at that remote site. I loved the live CD versions as most of these PC's had no HDD installed. So far so good. I had very good luck with Puppy linux as it was small and just always worked. Now that it has lost most of its support, I tried some others for an aging Toshiba Satellite laptop that was crippled with Intel 915 graphics, forgotten by Intel and not compatible with Win10 even though the Win7 constantly reminded me that Win10 was available for free. So I decided to jump in with both feet on a full SSD linux install. First I tried Puppy: installed fine, a little involved with all its Grub options and warnings but the repositories were all out of date, the look was very dated, and a very annoying feature was that you were always root, and Chromium refused to run as root! So I tried to modernize my Linux distro and go with Mint. It has worked great on 2 other dual boot laptops I own but they are newer than this 2006 Satellite Im working on. It installs spot on, manages its own grub settings, and is just a great distro, EXCEPT it doesnt even see my audio chip. Well, it "detects" it but never installs it, always "dummy output" on my sound settings and I spent 2 days trying to install the REaltek ALC861 drivers, or Intel_HDA drivers or whatever it wants to call them with no luck. I started reverting back to Puppy to see if the chip was malfunctioning as even Win7 lost it (my fault, the rotary sound control was turned down on that one) so I tried a few more. Debian didnt work with my sound, same dummy output, as well as that "hacker" distro and an older version of Mint. So I saw Knoppix was recommended as a sure fire working sound distro (along with puppy) in a sound problem forum so I decided to check it out. Low and behold, Knoppix 7.6 Live DVD actually found my sound, and worked! And it also looks great, very modern and FULL of apps, like 4Gb worth...so I cue up youtube and listen to a music video. there is sound, but its not real good, very choppy and "stutters" on pauses. I dismissed it to the Live DVD install and was sure the problem would rectify itself once I installed it on a very fast SSD. I installed it to my SSD using the "install to flash device" icon and told it my SSD was the target. It installed and rebooted off the SSD straight into Knoppix, but it acted like it was being read off a live DVD, ie. giving me warnings about not removing media, etc. Well, the sound issue was not rectified, I still get a very choppy sound stream on videos. Anyone have any recommendations on what could be causing the sound issues? Im actually suprised such a modern distro actually picked up my sound hardware to begin with but I would like decent sound, too much to ask?