"Choppy" sound on a new laptop

Hello, I just bought a laptop. here are the specs:

Inspiron 1420, Intel Core 2 Duo T8300(2.4GHz, 800Mhz, 3M L2 Cache)
3GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 Dimm
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 Inspiron 1420
250GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive for I1420

The first time i got the problem i left it on over night, to finish d/l some stuff and then when i got home from work i would try to play videos on youtube and the sound was all "choppy/broken up" i couldn't figure out why. So i restarted the laptop, then it worked fine, and then yesterday i was running "Reason 4.0" and i was running BitComet. and when i tried to play the song on Reason, it was all f'd up. i don't know if its the integrated audio or software problem. I am running vista but i think this computer should be able to handle Reason(which only takes up like 15-20 % of the processing) and bitcomet(which is about 10-15% processing). as a music producer i need my sound and i was relying on this to be my major machine but it can't even play sound out of youtube right at times so i wonder if i got a defected machine.

Check for a newer bios from Dell and see if there is a audio driver update.

thats what i plan on doing once i get home. but since i just got the computer shouldn't it be updated with the latst bios/drivers? and also how easy is installing the new bios?

No it not something Dell takes the time to do. Its up to you to keep it up to date. Download the file double click it and follow the directions very straight forward