On 23/11/2011 21:17, pjp wrote:
"SC Tom" wrote in message ...

"Ant" wrote in message
...
Hello.

Is there a such thing? I seem to be having rare and random (not easy
to reproduce) problems with my current RealTek onboard audio even
with old and newest/latest audio RealTek audio drivers in my updated
Windows (32-bit XP Pro. SP3 and 64-bit 7 HPE). And yes, I tried using a

Thank you in advance.

I had the best luck uninstalling ALL audio drivers, rebooting into
BIOS, and disabling the onboard audio. Save and boot. Then reboot into
BIOS, re-enable the onboard audio, boot up, and install the latest
RealTek/AC'97 drivers. You may have an install problem, pointing to
HDDAUD.SYS or some such program. If so, search for it on you PC- it's
probably already there. Once that's taken care of, the installation
goes pretty smoothly.

That said, I haven't stayed with onboard audio for very long. It has
always been flaky for me, no matter who made the audio chip. It would
be set up for 5.1 SS, and the next thing you know, it's now 2.0 or
2.1. Put it back to 5.1 and it would stay there for a while, but as
soon as I opened a game or something that didn't support 5.1, Windows
(or the audio driver setup) would put the speakers back to stereo and
I would have to manually change them. I had a couple of Creative Labs
external USB cards that worked well, but the newer ones, not so much.
I finally bought a Zalman RM-ZSSC V2 USB card and am very happy with
it. I get great surround sound out of it, and had no problems getting
it to work right out of the box.

http://www.epinions.com/review/Zalma...t_503714057860


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000E3B872/...N=B000E 3B872


I know that's probably not the solution you're looking for, but
barring getting the MB audio drivers to work, that's the route I took :-)
--
SC Tom



I concur. Onboard sound has always been lacking even on my current 7.1
system. Could not get it to work properly and the driver config program
didn't seem to offer much of anything (actually didn't seem to even have
one). Put in my old AOpen Cobra 850 and viola 5.1 back with both mic and
line inputs also working as expected (under Vista, no driver for 7 )

I've never understood why people need 7.1 sound systems. I certainly
have only two years and not eitht. So a Stereo system with a decent
amplifier and decent speakers is more than adequate for me as opposed to
eight run of the mill or even inferior speakers.

The sound will reverberate around a room and a good recording can create
that atmosphere which surround sound systems claim to create but do so
only in an artificial sounding way. What I hate most are the bass sounds
that come thumping to you with no definition of pitch.

The bane of modern feature films, surely! My blood boils when I hear
such artificial sounds!
-- choro