There are a number of things which can cause skipping in digital audio. Most all have to do with data being interrupted or simply output too slowly from the hard drive (or other storage medium) to the audio card or vise versa.
It is generally best to have a very fast hard drive dedicated only to digital audio. SCSI drives have traditionally been faster and more reliable but the new EIDE are catching up. No type of compression should ever be used on an audio drive. It is also recommended to defragment your drive regularly, especially if you get near capacity of the drive.
Multitrack transfer mode, if available, should be enabled on the HARDWARE tab of your DriverLink.
There is a lot of information tossed about from various sources on how to optimize audio performance in different systems.
In Windows 95 (and 98), it is generally suggested to minimize, or at least control, virtual memory activity. To do this, right click on "My Computer" on your desktop and select "Properties". Go to the "Performance" page and select "Virtual Memory". Check "Let me specify my own. . ." and enter the same value for both Minimum & Maximum, perhaps 16 (meg) for a 16 meg system, or 32 (meg) for a 32 meg system. Setting the Minimum and Maximum the same prevents repeated resizing of the swapfile.
Another suggestion is, from the same "Performance" page, select "File System" and turn "Read Ahead Optimization" all the way off (to the left), and perhaps select "Mobile or Docking System" rather than "Desktop Computer" as "Typical role of this computer". This also helps to reduce disk activity.
Some skipping, and other problems, can be caused by poorly designed or defective motherboards and related componentry. These rare but vexing situations are very hard to diagnose. We have seen cases in which replacing a certain motherboard with another, otherwise identical, motherboard fixed the problem. This, of course, is the extreme!
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