#!%& Soundcard!

Post by **Edi** » 2005-05-24 04:05pm

Yes, my rig is acting up. Again. This time it's the damn soundcard. I have a Soundblaster Live! 5.1 that has always been a piece of shit and for some reason I can't even get any drivers for it off the net, the ones that I'm always offered when I do try to find them tell me that no such device exists on my machine. So I decided to switch back to my old Aureal Vortex that was always better performance wise and never gave me any hassle. Until now.

Thing is, it works like a charm on my WinXP installation due to some new and improved drivers somebody had kindly enough written. But the Win98 I've got on my second hard drive, buy does that one get fucked up. Installing the Aureal Vortex drivers dynamically disables primary and secondary IDE controllers and they do not get back online until the drivers are removed. This is, to say the least, vexing.

In case anybody is wondering about the primay IDE controller, that's the one that has my WinXP HD on it, the secondary has my DVD-drive. My Win98 drive is in my primary UDMA controller (primary EXT), which the XP installation can't even see, so it works just fine. But it would be rather annoying to fiddle with the damned cables every time I want to switch from one system to the other.

Has anybody else ever encountered anything similar? My machine is five years old, so it's pretty ancient. I suspect part of the problem is the Abit BP6 mobo and how §the buses on that are implemented, but at least half of this shit is due to Windows. When I only ran Windows 98 (up until last September), I didn't have any problems because I had no hard drives on the normal IDE controllers, just on the EXT ones, so this problem never appeared. But because WinXP doesn't even recognize the UDMA buses, I'm no longer in that happy position.

Any help would be appreciated.

Edi

General Brock · Post by **General Brock** » 2005-05-24 08:14pm

Only advice I can give is to buy your dream sound card. The industry would prefer you to upgrade, and I don't think Soundblaster is the industry standard anymore. It could be the XP defaults, but you've probably checked that, and the Direct X and browser. Is it wonky for games, or just in general, like web content or playing music? What is the nature of the malfunction? Won't mix, won't work at all, garbles stuff?

Post by **Edi** » 2005-05-25 01:12am

The Soundblaster works relatively well, it doesn't have any clear and present malfunctions. I just can't upgrade its drivers, so I'm reduced to running it on the same ones that came with it three years ago when I bought the damn thing. When I did buy it, it was because the Aureal Vortex was acting up and refusing to support some games because it hadn't had any new drivers for a long while (due to Creative refusing to support the Aureal product line after they acquired the company). Quality wise the Aureal Vortex was always better. I remember how the SB fucked up the music and sounds in some games I had been playing at the time I switched.

I'm out of the kind of extra money you're talking about, so I can't buy a new soundcard. Looks like I'm going to have to come up with some kind of juryrig again, maybe put a second CD-drive in for Win98. Then the two operating systems would be truly separate systems with no overlap whatsoever.

Thanks anyway.

Edi

General Brock · Post by **General Brock** » 2005-05-25 04:48pm

Found some links anyway. The last Sound Blaster update seems to have been 2004, the last item is kind of technical.

http://drivers.soft32.com/driver/downlo ... 22638.html
http://drivers.soft32.com/driver/downlo ... 22624.html
http://www.tcmagazine.info/forums/lofiv ... /t621.html
http://www.opendrivers.com/searchopendrivers.php
http://www.alasir.com/aureal/

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/livetolive51/