Audio sounds as though it's skipping

[ddouglass]

How much memory does the laptop have?
Check you Task Manager while playing a song. Look at Performance tab and see what percentage of Processor time is in use and how much memory is being used. Also look at the Processes tab and see just what else is running.
Another thing that may help is to defrag your hard drive. I know you just loaded XP, but I can tell you from experience that Microsoft is the worst for not loading their stuff cleanly.