I have a PIII 933mhz with 384 mgs of PC 133mhz sdram. I am running Windows ME and lately I have noticed that when playing music or having more than one program open at a time, the music starts to skip or there are delays when performing operations in other programs. I don't know if it's my cpu or my ram. Please can somebody help!!!

Have you done the routine windows maintenance functions recently(delete temp internet files, scandisk and disk defragmentation)?

what are the other programs? usually if you have a cpu problem, you will get reboots. it sounds like your cpu isn't able to handle all of the multitasking. Your ram is good enough. I have no problems playing music while having many, many programs open...and i only have 256MB. although, maybe you don't have enough ram for your particular needs, and thus it is paging to the hard drive alot, while your music program is trying to read the music files off the hard drive

Have you considered it being the OS? Windows ME has got to be my least favorite Windows OS ever. Many people agree with me on this. Consider a move to 2000 or XP, as they are much better.

I am using a lot of graphics programs, so I guess I do need more ram to be able to multi-task the way I do. I am considering changing my OS...I have not been very happy with Windows ME. Thanks for your help! I'll let you know how it turns out.