I wouldn't have believed it until I did it myself - I was having the same problem and was starting to get annoyed. I upgraded to a sound card from my onboard sound cause I thought that was causing it...that didn't help. Then I started looking at processors to upgrade my aging P4 2.4 but decided to up the memory first since it was cheaper. I had 1gig and bought another gig. Now I can run my 6600gt on high settings w/aa and it barely ever skips on me and my machine is far from a high end gaming rig....before I could set everything to low or off and still it lagged on me.