Audio stutters

Hello,
I am new to this forum and any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm having a problem listening to music online. The sound "stutters" for lack of a better description This happened fairly recently although my sound playback has never been totally without this problem to some degree. It may just be my old Dell laptop that I got in 2006. I installed the newest flash version and it may have started then, although I'm not sure. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help.