Is sound crackling and jamming the sign of a need to upgrade?

[slapaham]

My 601MHZ, 128MB of RAM cab was working really well until I made the system a little more complicated with the option of running more programs. Now it still runs pretty smoothly but I get crackly, distorted sound and when I quit MAME into Mamewah the sound temporarily 'jams' - is this the sign of needing an upgrade? And if so, what parts would I need to upgrade? RAM? Sound Card? Both?

Please help!

[Thenasty]

Upgrade the ENTIRE Machine (Win) or Downgrade to Pure DOS. That way, you can't run to many thing at once.

[slapaham]

Well, at the moment, that isn't possible, so would upgrading both the RAM and the Sound Card do anything to solve this problem? Thanks for the response.

[slapaham]

I just increased the paging file and that stopped the sound problem on start up but the more I did, the worse the sound got which leads me to believe an upgrade of RAM might do the trick and that it isn't an actual sound issue... anyone confirm this either way? I'm a bit stumped  and don't want to fork out for an upgrade if it isn't going to do anything!

[ark_ader]

Why change?

Find a build that works with your rig and stick with it.

When you have the cash you can upgrade it to play all the laserdisc games and the latest shooters that require a 8 core 10ghz machine.

I would start at .84 and work from there. 

[slapaham]

Okay... I've opted to triple my RAM as I'm sure this problem lies with too many programs running at once and not enough memory to function them 100% - fingers crossed this will solve the problem.