sound question

[WW2Planes1]

My computer's sound, under certain circumstances, will sometimes skip or slow down. It happens both to MP3s and to regular windows sound effects.
I've noticed it especially under the following circumstances:

1) whenever I am dialing up (on my modem when i'm home) to connect to the internet. This one actually makes some sense, since my motherboard, sound card, and my MP3 hard drive are all running off the PCI Bus, so i'd imagine it is probably an overloaded PCI bus.

2) i also notice it sometimes when I'm installing stuff off of a CD. My DVD drive is on one of my motherboard's IDE busses, and my main system hard drive is on the other IDE bus. My MP3's however are on a hard drive on an IDE controller on the PCI Bus. I can't imagine that its because of an overloaded PCI bus in this case.

I've got an Athlon 1800XP running on an mobo with the VIA KT266 chipset. I'm not maxing out my memory (i've got 512MB). my processor is at 100%, but that is only because I'm also running SETI. I'm using iTunes for MP3 Playback right now, but it happens no matter what I use.

Is it possible i'm overloading the northbridge-southbridge link? I'm not very familiar with the specs of this chipset, so I don't know what the bandwidth there is, or if thats even an issue.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

it must be onboard sound, it skips because onboard sound relies more on software/cpu overhead than its own audio hardware. if you take away some cpu cycles when its under load it will skip.

seti won't effect this though because it runs at an extremely low priority