I installed and ran up SOAS and was upset to find my video AND audio to become stupidly choppy whenever the game was drawing objects as simple as the planets in the main menu. It turns out that the stuttering/choppy sound is just the side effect of a much more serious problem.

My game ran very slowly and every now and then it would completely freeze for a few seconds. I tried new drivers, new memory, more memory, and always the same thing. It ran like crap. My CPU sat around 40% and the ram stayed under 85%. Well I found a possible reason here:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=30162

I'm running a Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600 laptop with an Nvidia Go 7300, 1gb of ram, and 1.8G dual core intel processor. Just above some of the minimum specs, so it shouldn't be running like it's on a Pentium II.

It looks like there's a problem with this particular series of video cards -- notebook and desktop alike -- and Vista. This problem being there are no drivers for them. The only solution at this time is to uninstall Vista and go back to XP. I don't have my XP software or any media to back my stuff up on so I can't do this until I get back home at the end of the month, but from what I've read there should be a night-and-day improvement.

Hope that helps both people having problems and the devs here. It doesn't look like anything can be done on the dev end, but it's good to know for future reference.