Audacity Stopping

Hi there,
I’ve just recently purchased a new Sweetwater PC that came pre-installed with Audacity 2.1.2 and I’ve only just began to use it. I’ve gotten partially through a new recording project and it just stopped playing and started bouncing or like a record was skipping and going no where. It messes up my windows 10 program and I can’t even access the shut down or reset button so I have to manually reset my PC. Audacity begins again but when I try to continue with the recording I was doing, it does the same thing over and over again. any idea what’s up with this?

“Crashing” is usually a hardware/driver-related problem.

What are you recording from? The mic built-into a laptop? A USB audio interface? Streaming audio? Etc.?