Skipping audio help

[JackintheGreen]

Here's my problem:

I cannot run any saved audio files through any application (say iTunes) and do anything else at the same time without my sound skipping. For example, I cannot update my iPod or download an unrelated program and listen to iTunes at the same time or stream audio and record it using an application like Audacity at the same time without skipping. I have checked drivers, configurations, conflicts, viruses/spyware, and everything else I can think of. What else could I check?

Thanks

[RoyGBiv]

1. Hard drive ...

Those other actions your mention are all accessing the hard drive. It may be too old and slow, or it could be heavily fragmented, or too close to full, etc. Several things can drastically reduce hard drive performance.

[JackintheGreen]

2. Well that would be the most obvious thing to check first

but the drive is only 18 months old and my applications have changed very little since then (and it used to do these things just fine).

The system as a whole is 1.7GHz, 480MB, defragged frequently - and I did check that, too - with about 40% capacity left.

So...

1. old and slow: not really
2. heavily fragmented: no
3. too close to full: no

Which is why I'm thinking, with everything else I checked, that it's gotta be something more obscure. Now I'm the first to admit that I'm no techno-whizz-kid (which has kept me from converting back to Linux), and I'm at a loss. Any other suggestions?

[RoyGBiv]

3. Question ...

480MB? Is that the size of the hard drive?

[JackintheGreen]

5. Wrote that at 4a,m.

Not sure where that number came from, but it is somehow related to the 512MB of SDRAM.

Hard drive is 60 GB, processor, as I mentioned, is a 1.7Mhz Pentium M

[hobbit709]

4. what applications do you have running in the background

If you have too many things open at once, the systems stutters as it were. Try rebooting the system and play the audio with nothing else open. if it works fine then, try opening your other applications one at a time while the audio is playing. When it starts to stutter something is eating too many system resources to let it work efficiently.

[JackintheGreen]

6. Typically nothing

I do have a Spy Sweeper and Symantec anti-virus passively in the background, but I've already tried without them on. You can perhaps see why I'm so stymied.

[Berserker]

7. Have you tried this?

Click on the "Sounds and Audio Devices" or Multimedia under the control panel
Click on the "Audio" tab
Click the "Advanced" button under "Sound Playback"
Click the Performance tab
Move the slider for "Hardware Accelertion" to Full

[RC]

8. Bring up Window Task Manager

and check the CPU usage. This tells you how hard the computer is working.
Then the click on the Processes tab. Click on the CPU header once or twice as need be and see what is using the CPU time. System Idle Process should normally be a high number, anything else with high numbers need to be checked out, especially if you don't recognize the Image Name.