Hi All - Can you fix this

Hi all you Geeks. Just joining in and getting my feet wet. I do have an interesting problem.

Have a Dell computer with a 3g processor and 500M of ram. I frequently play cd's and it has started distorting sound when I run more then one program. It had been working fine.

Using the performance monitor I have found that when I start a second program the pages/sec jumps up to almost max and stays there. Typically it goes down to almost nothing after the program loads. With the pages/sec that high when ever the systems goes to load in more data from the cd there is a delay causing the sound to interupt.

I have discoved when I stop a function the pages/sec drop to normal and when I close a program (more then three running) the paging drops.

Even with three or four programs the programs are not using excessive memory which might cause this paging.

Any ideas???

Poppi