[danudey]

Not the parent poster, but I'll chime in.

I have a pretty solid Dell laptop from work, and yet, there is one frustration that beats out anything else: audio.

I can't play music without it stuttering and skipping and sounding choppy and cutting out if something resource-intensive is happening, like Firefox loading a new page (but how often does THAT happen?)

Same with audio notifications. When my "new mail" notification sounds choppy, the underlying system must be just absolute garbage.