Sound skips during playback

[notadamnhippo]

I have a problem that's plagued me for nearly 2 years and it drives me crazy.
Whenever I play sound, my the playback skips as the hard drive reads/writes.  In other words, the light comes on, and the playback skips.  I'm not sure when this problem started exactly.

This phenomenon happens when I stream audio or video from the internet, play mp3's (in itunes and winamp and Windows media), even when I boot up, the boot sound skips.

I get around this while streaming by waiting for the whole thing to buffer first, then when I play the video the hard drive doesn't run, and I'm skip-free. (Until the HD gets busy)

I've tried reinstalling my audio driver (I have the most current version now)
Setting my page file to a constant 3300 MB (3057 mb is recommended)
And I'm stumped.  A little help?

System info:
Sony Vaio VGN fs-740 laptop
Windows XP Home Ver. 2002 SP2
1.73 GHZ
2 GB  Ram
68 GB Hard drive with 10 GB free
3300 MB page file
Realtek HD Audio with current driver

[pcwizard]

Right click your task bar at the bottom of your screen and select Task Manager.

How many processes are running straight after boot up, and what is your CPU usage at?

[notadamnhippo]

I can trim down to 50 processes, but right now I'm running 60.  Sony vaios come with a metric assload of bloatware.
CPU usage hovers around 5-20 Percent normally.  When I stream audio, it jumps to 10-30 percent.  youtube, it jumps to 40-60 percent.