I've got this Dell Inspiron 1000 that I just got. Its always had a faint popping noise with any audio playe in any program, be it DVD, MP3, Windows Media or a CD. Anything. Its got onboard sound controled by SoudMAx drivers. I started with the usual routes, upgrading drivers and tweaking a bunch of settings, but there was never any change. Finally I found someone with a similar problem on here and one of the reccommended fixes was to change from an ACPI PC to Standard PC. So I did that, and upon reboot all drivers were reinstalled and everything. Now my sound sounds great as long as that's the only thing running. As soon as I start another program or anything, it begins to scratch and be crappy, sometimes even completely stopping for a second or two. I have de and re installed the sound max driver with no luck. I feel like this is some setting somewhere that needs to set priorities or something. Any ideas?

First off are you using a sound card or the onboard audio ??