choppy sound in games

[1515panopticon]

one of my friends from work was working on my pc to try to get half-life 2 to run a little smoother, he thinks it's the sound reading from the hard drive because every time a sound plays or changes, the game lags, he didn't fix it but made it a little better...Anyways, since he did that the sound has been choppy for some of my games, I asked him why and said he installed a older IDE driver or something, so I installed the latest one. Still choppy. The sound is choppy in Flatout, Star Wars KOTORII, HL2, and some of counter-strike. I've tried installing latest sound driver, latest agp chipset driver, turning down sound performance, and changing the latency of the sound. I'm out of ideas, Anybody?

 

[Mr. Switch]

way back in the day, i tried running Quake 3 on my old 400MHz Celeron and ATI rage IIC. the sound cut in and out and ended up being because i didnt' have a fast enough video card. it wasn't untill i bought a TNT2 that i saw what i was missing in the sound department. what are your system specs? if your running anything less than a GeForce 4 ti, than you'll have problems. also, HL2 has alot of physics so your CPU could be the problem. it would really help if you posted your specs. you also might need to buy an actual sound card, onboard is bad because it takes away CPU cycles. also, reformatting is a good idea, it seriously fixeds everything!

 

[1515panopticon]

1.6 ghz pentium 4
256mb ram (getting more, this may be the problem)
ATI Radeon 9550