I have and therefore listen to a lot of music. But, I rarely listened to music on my computer until recently. My onboard soundcard was fine before, for music and even games, but recently it's been choppy when playing iTunes. It seems to be more choppy when the songs were faster, and less when they were slower. It also seems to skip more often when I'm doing something memory intensive. But, by intensive, I don't mean CAD or anything. Clicking a link in Firefox will skip the song, or opening a new tab. Simply scrolling however seems to do nothing.

So, I bought a Creative X-Fi Audio Xtreme or something along those Xtreme lines... This worked no better, so it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue. So:

a) Is something in my computer failing?

b) Could crappy speakers be at fault? I'm just using JBL Encounters, but the problems with skipping while opening tabs makes me wonder about the speaker's involvement. I have no better speakers to test with.

c) If not a or b, what is wrong?

Muchas gracias.