About few weeks ago I was having a recurring problem with Skype. I would be talking just fine and then every minute or every couple minutes I suddenly could not hear the person on the other end. I could tell when it was happening because it would literally be silence, not even background noise. The silence would only last about 3-5 seconds and then I could hear the person again. It was quite frustrating though because the person I was speaking to could not tell when it happened so they would have to repeat their words quite often for me.
I tried downloading the latest version of Skype, reinstalling and even downloaded the beta to see if it was a bug that had been fixed. Finally I watched the Task Manager and noticed that the processor would reach 100 percent every time the audio cut out. Now that I had some correlation I wondered what could cause this. Because my laptop also felt warm I decided maybe it was overheating. I had been foolishly setting my laptop on my bed because it was late when I was talking (that’s what 15 or 16 time zones away will do to you) and the vents were being blocked by the soft blanket. Everyone should know this and even I knew it and had warned friends in the past to place the laptop on a solid surface to keep the airflow underneath moving. I guess I had used it without issue on the bed several times and forgot my own advice. Setting the laptop on a hardcover book on top of my bed so the airflow is still going did the trick.
I am really only posting this because I searched for a while to find a solution to the problem and never found one online. If anyone else is having this issue, try getting some more airflow to your computers vents. It just may be as simple as that.