Heavily distorted audio even after fresh install of bootcamp.

Question

I'm running BootCamp with Windows 7 64-bit on a Macbook Pro (15-inch, early 2011).
I haven't been having any issues with sound until about 4-6 months ago. Since then, over time more and more of my games are having audio issues. An example is http://youtu.be/e-skZ3e5Wm4?t=10s .  All bass is translated to garbled noise, and if there's more than a few channels of sound going on at once it gets pretty ridiculous sounding. Crackling/Popping/Distorted sound. Even the sample rates seem to warp as you can hear in the video, the voice is stretched out and heavily distorted.
This is happening in many of my games which have been working flawlessly over the passed year, now suddenly they are almost all having this problem. I've tried http://brianreiter.org/2010/08/16/fixed-boot-camp-audio-pops-and-crackles-with-w indows-7-x64/  and it doesn't work. I've tried changing the sample rates, doesn't work. I'm stumped.
Should I upgrade to windows 8? Is it because Apple has stopped releasing updates for the windows 7 bootcamps?

Answer 1

It's not a virus.
The screen you see (that requests you to restart your computer) is referred to as a kernel panic; these are often hardware-related.
What you're describing sounds like a possible hard drive failure.
Have you run the Apple Hardware Test? Is your computer still under warranty?
Get your data backed up, if you haven't already, just in case!
~Lyssa