I have to disable my good sound card and use the on board ac97 or else it freezes up after playing any audio for more than a few seconds.
The soundcard is a Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo II.


Before anyone asks:
I have the lasest drivers for EVERYTHING.
I have the latest bios upgrade.
I have ALL the OS updates.

Can anyone help me? I miss all that EAX and 5.1 surround stuff.

Hmm, I am not sure what to say if you have the latest drivers, does the sound card manufacturer have XP specific drivers? Do they awknowledge any problemw ith XP?

They don't acknowledge any xp problems. The drivers come in the usual one size fits all OS's install.exe format. On the site it claims to be for "windows 9x/me/nt/2000/XP". Of course I get the little message that the drivers don't have the official Bill Gates seal of approval, but I get the same thing for my modem and nic, and they work fine.

I sent them a message to customer support listing all the information they asked for(model/cpu/motherboard/os, etc...) and so far they haven't gotten back to me. Maybe they're confused, or maybe they don't really care.

Before trying to use the good sound card, you did try and disable the onboard sound in the bios, right?

Yeah, it was disabled. I never had to enable it until now.

Easy solution found. My buddie's Soundblaster Live was acting quirky on him, so we switched and now they both work fine.

The cards are about equally capable, so we're both happy.

Strange...Hercules stuff tends to be pretty reliable....

Hmm, thats really odd, but happy it all worked out.

I've heard of similar incidents where problems arise in certain combinations of OS,Mobo,bios,drivers,etc...

Probably just a combination thing.

Did you check irq's? I had the same problem, and it turned out that my soundcard and capturecard were sharing an irq (this isnt unusual), but that one of them didnt like to share. Placing it in a different slot gave it a different irq, and then it all worked fine again.

yep. I tried that too. It just didn't seem to like my computer.

I noticed other strange things too, like Easy CD Creator 5 platinum upon installing will keep windows 2000 from booting up at all, but Easy CD creator 5 basic works fine. Both work in XP.

Don't get me wrong. I really like this new computer, but it seems to not like certain things I put into it. Kinda like it has allergies or something.