Im wondering if i can get any advice on an audio issue im having.

Im a dj and use an Acer Extensa laptop wth a stripped down install of XP. Its a fairly old machine with a dual core centrino processor and 1gb ram but for what i use it for, is, or should i say was, perfect

I have developed an audio glitch which is unfortunately intermittent. If anything i'd say its after several hours use before the isuue come to light

So i load a song into my Dj software and i plays perfectly. I load my next song and its not very good, with a kind of mild stuttering effect. I can reload the same song later and its fine. I can confirm the tracks (mp3's) themselves are fine

Now i use an external dual channel denon usb audio device and have swapped both usb leads and soundcards to eliminate those

In fact as my dj softweare has a record facility and i have sucesfully recorded a bad segment of audio which come directly from source, telling my it is without a doubt a laptop issue.

So, somewhere between my hdd and outputting data to the usb hub there is a problem.

could it be something like Hdd reading or ram writing. what would be the physical process of extracting a 'track' from the hdd and then playing it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Cheers

Link to audio - http://soundcloud.com/dave71/audio-issue

Update

Just ran memtest86 twice with no errors. Am upgrading the ram anyway considering the cost

Having explore numerous avenues im pretty convinced my system is just not up to the job. I have found a way to recreate the issue which is adjusting the pitch of the track whilst maintaining the same key. This process is quite resource hungary. Will fit the ram when it gets here and update

Do you routinely clean out TEMP files and other accumulated junk? Your PC probably creates a lot of such clutter files.

Do you defrag from time to time?

That could be a significant difference maker, especially on older equipment.

My laptop rarely gets used as a normal laptop would, i only use it on the web to download itues media and the only files that get added are mp3's which i rip from cd. its not very often anything get removed or deleted

I have just run a disk cleanup and windows cleared very little space. a defrag made no difference either. I only have windows, my dj software and itunes installed along with a few essential device drivers (latest versions) on a 20 gig partition.

if anything the problem has worsened with updates from my dj sofware developer which makes me believe my system is under powered

thanks for the reply, really apprecaite evry bit of input i recieve

Fixed

It was a software issue after all that which has been resolved by changing a few settings. Im up to 3gb ram anyway so its onwards from here.