Drivers/Hardware :: Error With Sound And Video?

There may be something simple I'm overlooking here, but recently I've noticed that audio on my computer (music, videos, games) every so often plays a glitchy sound, and the video and music lag for the same time period. It's an occurrence that happens fairly frequently but not predictably (i.e. there is no pattern to it at all). It's as if the audio "stutters".

It's not the fact that I'm running a lot of power-hungry programs (happens when, for example, five programs are running or only one); it makes no difference where the programs are stored (i.e. SSD or HDD) and, for that matter, I don't believe it's hardware-related at all as this does not happen on my parallel Xubuntu install; it's not due to lack of disk space nor running background processes.

It's not hugely detrimental to my work but it is becoming a mild-to-moderate annoyance whenever I do anything multimedia-related.

Note: It may also be related (but is a different set of symptoms) that when playing MS Solitaire Collection for long periods of time, the game will begin to freeze altogether for short periods of time, this time periodically and predictably and longer than any other game. "Long periods of time" is anything over about ten-fifteen minutes, and the freezing gets worse the longer I play.