Occasional st-st-stutters in music/ALC655

Hi,

this has been plaguing me since I had this motherboard.

Biostar K8NHA-M, which is an nForce 3 board, with Realtek ALC655 AC97 audio (however, I don't think its a problem with the audio, as it does a similar thing with a Maxi Sound Muse USB soundcard...).

Problem stops when I turn off wireless (its a cheap Realtek 8180 PCI card, Edimax brand).

The sound every minute or two or three (its not every 5 seconds) just lags for a quarter of a second...like the buffer is empty and it just has to replay the last packet of sound until whatever is lagging catches up...kinda sounds like the record is scratched but very quickly and then fixed (if that makes any sense, if not stick with "it stutters"!).

Now, it WAS all okay, until I stupidly installed Service Pack 2 (running W XP Pro)...Zone Alarm crashed the install process so I had to uninstall and reinstall (which lost all my wireless settings and everything, including the driver) the incomplete SP2.

HOW it was okay I'm not sure, just installing different driver combinations until it seemed okay...

Anyone have any ideas apart from trying different driver versions? I put the latest nForce drivers on, latest Realtek ALC655 and 8180 (audio and wireless) drivers...

Strangely the problem is more noticeable in iTunes (and the startup WAV file!)...I think putting all these new drivers on has minimised the problem but not eradicated it altogether in iTunes.

Just tested "Jagged Little Pill" on Foobar rather than iTunes, got to within the last 20 seconds of track 1 before noticing any distortion (thats 4:10 or so...).

Had a quick google, couldn't see anything (again)...any ideas??

How much Ram have you got?

Can't you just junk the wireless card and get something better?

Or change the PCI slot it's in, might be sharing an IRQ with the sound card.

RAM: A Gig

Junk wireless: Yeah I guess...I already have a Linksys one that seems to only work in Macs (NO idea, but I was using it in a Mac to start with...don't know if its "broken" or the mac just updated some firmware or something very odd)...but with a Realtek audio chip and Realtek wireless chip I'm just not sure its not something with the motherboard, rather than the chips...IIRC, this mobo is very picky about PCI slots anyway (as in, put things in some, and it doesn't POST let alone boot...)

Hmm, guess I'll just have to....ditch it all and get a new board :)