Vista - My audio is lagging seamlessly in fullscreen games

Right, so. My sis got a computer a couple of days ago. We're both very new to vista, but I'm a bit more of a comp wonk, so when it started to bug up a little, I thought I'd play around with it to get a handle on the system.

I'm having a bit of trouble getting a handle on the system. It's not my computer, so I can't tell you every spec right now, and I don't even have access to it at the moment. So this thread is, for now, a bit of a hail-mary pass. If the problem is recognizable enough to diagnose from my scant details, awesome. If not, I'll post them as I discern them.

That being said, the problem is this; as far as my tests have led me to believe, in full screen games only, my sound lags. Usually during cut-scenes, but sometimes during gameplay itself. But the thing is, it's strangely seamless. There's no crackle or distortion. A slight pause, and then the sound cuts off while the video goes on. After about 7-12 seconds, the sound comes back right where it left off, only now the video is obviously out of sync with it.

It's a 32 bit os, multicore processor, 4 gigs ram, Nvidia 7600 GT card. Every driver is up to date unless I made a mistake with the updating processes, and the audio chipset is the intel soundmax hd audio(I couldn't find any drivers for this chipset, so it's probably running at out of box drivers. The auto update told me they were up to date, but I've never trusted that thing, sooo.)

Thanks for reading if you've made it down this far. Ordinarily I would just wait to post this until I've gotten more information, but I'm absolutely neurotic about these things and I couldn't get to sleep if I didn't know that someone might recognize the problem and have a fix for me to try by the time I wake up.

You should uninstall the audio drivers and then google them for the latest, Microsoft won't always detect the latest drivers. Also check your event log when you get a chance and see if it mentions anything about driver performance. You can also check this in the performance panel of the Contreol Panel.

Hey, thanks a lot for the response. It turned out that there wasn't enough space allocated to the buffering memory. So I slid it up to a gig and it seems to have fixed the problem, but I had never really paid attention to the performance section before and now that I'm actually looking at it, it seems like a good resource, so I'll have to keep that in mind as well.

I'm glad the problem has been resolved.