New player- don't know where to begin

[Prophet]

Yeah. I got DW and 1.04 and I had ridiculous slowdown issues on 1x speed. The only recommendation from the FAQ that solved anything was the vertical sync thing, but that only kinda helped. It runs smoothly with VSync but every so often I get a ridiculously loud ping from the sonar that makes my ears bleed, and the slowdown for maybe 4 seconds, and suddenly the game time has jumped forward maybe 10 minutes. What should I do now?

Also, does anyone have a problem with the music looping the same ~8 seconds of sound over and over again?

Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2
Geforce 8600
AB Audigy SE 24 bit
ASUS M2N-E board
4 GB RAM, 93 GB HD space

[OneShot]

Posting your System specs and other helpful information would go a long way in letting us help you ...

[goldorak]

I bet you have an amd processor. If so, go to amd's website and download the dual core optimizer. It should fix those timing/lag problems.

DW is very heavy on audio processing, so integrated sound cards that have flacky drivers will not do well with the game.
You'll get sound corruption, and in some extreme cases even lockups.
Even dedicated sound cards are not exempt from these problems. It all comes down to drivers. You have good and stable sound drivers, the game will go smooth; bad drivers and all hell breaks loose.

For the loud ping, how about setting the audio a little bit less loud ?
You can do that from the option panel.

[Prophet]

Posting your System specs and other helpful information would go a long way in letting us help you ...

Sorry, forgot to do that.

I'm nervous about getting the Dual Core Optimizer. If something goes wrong and I need to revert, will a system restore get rid of it?

Also, the sonar pings are usually normal volume and everything's fine, but whenever I get a slowdown the sonar does that high volume thing.

And drivers are all updated.

[goldorak]

The Dual Core Optimizer is an official fix from AMD (to correct basically the symptoms you're describing with DW), its not some warez file you'll be downloading from god knows where. ;)