I've been having this problem with my laptop for a while now. It's a fairly new laptop, and one day i just started having problems with the audio - when the processor is busy or when the hard disk is being accessed (my little green light flashes), the audio thats playing will slow down and stutter. It's incredibly annoying as it means that whenever I want to listen to music, I have to close all my programs down, which is obviously not very useful as I want to listen to music while I'm doing other things! The laptop has onboard Realtek HD Audio, which obviously isn't great but should still be able to play a mp3 without stuttering! Anyone have any ideas what I could do to sort this out? I've updated my driver for the sound, and my laptop is virus/spyware etc free.

"my laptop is virus/spyware etc free". At least you think it is clean. Something is using more cpu cycles than before. Or your laptop is running slower than before. This goes to spyware or newly installed programs or possibly overheating.

what player are u using? Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

Make sure that DMA is enabled for your hard drive. Pentium III--Descendant of Intel Core. Pentium III-S 1400 @ 1.63GHz, 512K L2 X800XT AIW OC 580/600 2GB of RAM 250GB HD SB Audigy 2 QDI Advance 12 mobo Smugly running Vista

I'm using Windows Media Player 11, but it's not that that's causing the problem as all sounds suffer from the problem - Windows start-up sounds, alerts, sounds on web pages etc. How do I check that my hard drive is DMA enabled?