Edit: It's fixed now, hardware issue.

Original post:

I'm playing Unreal 2 and I having a lot of stuttering that it seems that happens when a new sound is loaded.

I've disable the sound in the [Engine.GameEngine] section of the Unreal2.ini and then the game run without problems (but without effect sounds of course but music still works)

I've defraged the hard disk with MyDefrag to move the game to the start of the disk (I have a dedicated hard disk for games) to see if there was any difference, but there was no change.

My sound card is a Realtek High Definition Audio, driver is up to date. I'm using the OpenAL 2.1.0.0 and the game is configured to use the system driver (I've previously tried to use the driver that comes with the game)

Anyone has any possible advice to resolve this?

Edit: Just in case it could be useful I'm in a Windows 7 64 bit machine, i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz, 32.0 GB of RAM with a 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.
I think is more than enough to run the game without issues.

I am sorry to inform that I have and have had this same problem across many different computers in many different games with different versions of Windows. Never encountered in Linux but then I have played very few games in Linux so not conclusive.

After some testing I found the issue.

It was a problem with the hard drive, it looks like it was too slow for the game.

I installed a new one and so far so good.

Unreal 2 is a game from 2003, the issue was far more likely to be file corruption/some compatibility issue than your HD being "too slow", sounds like your drive was on its way out, and the problems with the game were just a symptom of that.