I've recently installed a Gamesurround Hercules Fortissimo 2 sound card to solve my stuttering problem, but it's made no difference. Basically, as i play games the sound will stutter at the same time there is a graphic slowdown, only very brief but annoying.

My system is a fairly high spec (512 DDR, AMD XP 2600, Geforce4 Ti4800SE) so i'm thinking that i should not have these kinds of problems. Can someone please help?

Have you make sure that you have installed the newest driver? Older driver sometimes tend to be buggy.

Have you tried changing PCI slot or adjusting the PCI Latency setting in the BIOS?

Changing slots is one of the first things to try. With those specs you shouldn't be experiencing stuttering. Were you having trouble with the onboard sound? I normally use the SPDIF on mine but I have gamed with the analog out and had no stutter and I think the sound is as good as my GTXP. Which drivers are you using on that A7N8X?

Stuttering usually the result of disk activity while sharing the same physical interrupt line between the disk and PCI slot the sound card is in. There may be something in the manual about which interrupts are shared between onboard devices and PCI slots. Here's something I found on the net...

"To minimize risks of IRQ configuration issues when installing your professional soundcard you should consider PCI slot #2 and/or #4 as first priority. If you are not using onboard audio and midi (IRQ 10 by default) you can free up irq positions by disabling these resources. Similarly, you can disable the serial ATA controller – you then have to manually disable the serial header on the motherboard (serial ATA is enabled by default; to disable serial ATA place the jumpers to position 2-3; see manual, section 2.7.1). If you are only using the first IDE channel you can also free up irq position 15 by disabling the second IDE channel in BIOS. If you are using several external PCI-DSP cards, in combination with one or several soundcards, it makes sense to guarantee as many independent IRQs as possible across the PCI bus."

I'd suggest trying the nVidia 2.41 drivers with the new IDE drivers but so many people had trouble with those nVidia pulled them. I, on the other hand, had no trouble with those drivers. Good luck.

I've changed to PCI slot 4. I disabled the onboard sound thru BIOS. After reinstalling the souncard using the original drivers that came with the card, i put GTA:Vice City on, similar problem to before, perhaps slightly better. However in the audio options, it now lets me use EAX, which it didn't when i was using the newest drivers. I also lowered my resolution to 800x600x16, which i was grieved at doing after buying an expensive (for me) graphics card.

On checking my system resources, they are only at 73%, could this be making my system struggle more than it should? After Cntrl, Alt, del there seems to be nothing else i can shut down.

I'm very grateful for all the help guys!

What OS are you using?

Here is a thread which tells you where you can find info about what is running the backgroun on 2000/xp...

If there is stuff running in the background you're unsure of what does, ask there, and we'll do our best to help you figure it out

Using 98 SE
In background i have running:
Atrack
Navapw32
Explorer
Rundll32
Iamapp
Smonitor
Systray