What programs?  Are these games?

What mode is your Primary IDE channel running in (DMA or PIO)?
What video card do you have?

Ron

i guess you have intergrated sound, does it skip when the cpu useage is high?

how do I find out what ide channel I am running. i have a geforce fx 5200 128 mb graphic card.

Open Device Manager
Expand list under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Right-click Primary IDE Channel and select Properties
Click Advanced Settings tab

Post back with 'Transfer Mode' and 'Current Transfer Mode' for both device 0 and device 1.

Ron

on the transfer modes for both it is dma in the current for device 0 its in ultra dma mode. On device 1 it says not applicable. 

Ultra dma for device 0 is right. Is it mode 2? If you only have 1 optical drive, "not applicable" is probably correct for device 1.

So that's probably not the cause of the audio problem. Back to my earlier question, what video card do you have? And when the audio skips does Task Manager (press ctrl-alt-del) show high CPU usage?

Ron

Message Edited by RoHe on 11-16-2005 10:39 AM

There's a difference between processing running in the background and processing using CPU time. You may see lots of things loaded into memory, but they may not be using much/any CPU time.

Open Task Manager when the sound is skipping and look in the CPU column on the Processes tab. Aside from System Idle Process, what's using CPU time? And how much is being used?
(Process Explorer, free from www.sysinternals.com, is better than Task Manager for this.)

Ron