Jerky, distorted audio

Not sure if this is the right forum or not, but when using iTunes to play music, sometimes my computer will suddenly get very slow and the song I'm playing will start sounding all wacky, suddenly as if in slow motion, just sounds very strange. It last maybe a second or 2. I tried a little test where I watched the CPU Usage % meter, and it shot all the way up from maybe 50% to 100% whenever the audio slows down like that.

I recently defragged my hard drive, have checked for spyware/viruses, have about 3.2 gigs free on my HD, which is plenty of room for the swap file.

My computer is a Dell laptop 1.1ghz with 256 MB of RAM. So it's not blazing fast, but should be fast enough to run iTunes with no problem. And yes, I have tried to not have 20 billion windows open on the screen. And I don't have a ridiculous amount of programs running in the background or anything Any other ideas?

 

Have taskmanager open and watch for what takes up all those extra resources when it happens.

 

So I've figured out what the problem is. At one time, I had IE, AIM and iTunes open. Now I have 1.1ghz with 256 of RAM, so it should be able to handle that. but I closed AIM etc, and audio still skipped etc. I'm on a college network, and I turned off the sharing function for iTunes, so people can't access my music library, and now the skipping is totally gone. I don't understand it. I'm on a fast college campus connection, with a relatively good computer. Shouldn't my computer be able to handle someone connected to my computer.

I just noticed though that now with the sharing off, my cpu usage goes up to 100% at times (with IE and iTunes open) but the audio plays smoothly. HMM

The other thing I can think of is that I have an external USB 2.0 drive plugged into a 1.1 port, since my laptop is a few years old, and I can't have a modem and a USB hub card plugged in at the same time But that shouldn't be much of a problem, it's been fine in the past

hmm...any thoughts. Are there maybe some memory (virtual memory) settings I should maybe change to make things run smoother?

 

hate to up this but, any ideas?