Choppy Sound on a Thinkpad SL500

[cracked]

Howdy,

At seemingly random times my sound on my Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 gets choppy for a few seconds then recovers. It is as if many small intervals of silence are inserted into whatever I am listening to. I usually use the latest Winamp but I have heard this happening with system sounds also. I dont think it is an issue with memory or processor usage because I go to task manager and close a bunch of things and it still does it. It happens usually when browsing the web but also sometimes happens when just at idle. Very frustrating. Anybody know how to fix this? Thanks!

btw, running windows xp.

Duroo

[cracked]

so... no ideas then? i cant find the solution it seems. tried updating my sound drivers, no luck. still same as above, please if u have any ideas let me know, thanks

drew

[JLK03F150]

Have you watched Task Manager while Winamp is running until it gets choppy? Stopping some processes, doesn't mean you stopped the process that's causing it. It sounds like a CPU spike to me, but I guess it could be file paging too. How much RAM do you have & how many processes are running?

[cracked]

2 gigs of ram, at the moment there are 69 processes running. i have watched task manager when this happens and cant tell any difference, the cpu usage graph doesnt seem to show a spike when this happens, but yeah thats what i thought at first too, a cpu spike, but it seems not to be the case...

[JLK03F150]

Sixty-nine processes? In XP?
Even with 2GB of RAM it's possible you are hitting the Page File. Do you see a lot of activity with the HDD light?

Of course you did say it still does it with a bunch of processes shut down...

Have you tried a different mp3 player, such as VLC or just a different version of winamp? One of my PCs happens to hate Win Media Player - CPU spikes to 90%, CPU fan ramps up, video stutters. Several other player work just fine.