Hey guys, I had been having an issue when using the E17 as a DAC where the audio would stutter on occasion. Just for the record, I never once thought that it was an E17 issue. It would always happen when multi-tasking, like listening to music and web browsing at the same time. It was definitely an issue of either high CPU usage or high memory usage. My laptop is a couple year old basic lowish end HP G60. It's a dual core 2.20GHZ Pentium, Windows 7 64-bit, with 3GB of ram, so nothing fancy, but not terribly low end or old either. I think it was around $400 when i got it a couple years ago.
Anyway, what I tried tonight was removing every single piece of software or bloatware that was on here that I never use, and then of course a reboot when I was done. I removed stuff like Office 2007, HP support assistant, expired Norton anti-virus, and crap like that. Stuff that may be running that never actually gets used. I also chose a Windows 7 theme that has no animations or anything fancy going on, I tried the theme before by itself and still had hiccups, but I figured this on top of removing stuff should help even more. It's only been a couple of hours since, but so far not a single hiccup or stutter. Before this, I would get a quick hiccup every time I would refresh a webpage or switch between iTunes and Chrome. CPU usage seems lower overall, and there is definitely less memory being used. Before it would sit around 60-75%, now it's been just under 50% ever since the reboot. I hope it's not to soon to think this problem is solved, but so far it seems like it has been resolved.