Winamp stuttering/skipping

[Zeus]

Hey guys I need some help. Recently I've been having problems with Winamp stuttering (little 2-3 second stutters). I think it started happening around when I hooked up a new printer. However, I deleted all printer connections and it did nothing to stop the problem. I tried monitoring the CPU usage on the Windows Task Manager but there is no notable CPU usage spikes when the stutter happens. However, my computer tower has a light to show when the computer is "busy" and I noticed when the stutter in winamp happens, the light seems to always be red (on) throughout the 2-3 second stutter time and then goes off when the stutter stops. I tried disabling a bunch of unneeded startup programs and even had Winamp running by itself and just the processes needed to run windows. I tried messing around with the sound output in winamp and neither of these attempts have solved the problem. I am running the latest (5.32) version of winamp by the way. Just a few days ago, I was running winamp perfectly fine, no stutters or anything. I could have tons of programs open and even play a game while listening to winamp and still have no stuttering, then just a few days ago it started stuttering a lot.

Also, I'm not sure if there's any correlation but I'm also getting occasional game stuttering in Final Fantasy 7 for the PC. That is what's leading me to believe it's a background process causing this, rather than winamp itself. Not 100% sure yet though.

Specs

Nvidia BFG 6800 OC
Windows XP SP2
2 GB RAM
Creative X-Fi sound card

 

[Asus]

Does it stutter all the time or just when it loads the next song? For awhile on my PC songs were stuttering (playing with itunes) when it would load the next song for a couple seconds. A defrag solved that. I'd watch your processes and see if anything sticks out for cpu usage or memory wise.

Maybe go to Start->Run (windows key + R) and type msconfig. Under the Startup tab, if you see something you know you don't want running at startup you can uncheck it.

 

[Zeus]

It stutters all the time, and randomly. I also did a defrag and it solved nothing. Like I said, no noticeable CPU spikes either. All useless startup progs have been disabled as well to no avail.

 

[Reaktor4]

Winamps playback buffer underrunning is whats wrong Ill bet.. Try going to Winamp/options/preferences/plugins/output/directsound output/configure/buffering and increase the size of the buffers till the stuttering stops, or decrease if its already set very high. Im assuming youre using the directsound plugin, if not do so.