I have been having horrible sound problems with my system. Since my Monster MX 300 no longer was supported and does not work in XP, I bought a SB Live card. As with many people, I was getting scratchy noise, system hangs, NetMeeting would crash. Now, not all people will have had the same cause as me, but my problem was that my IRQ's were badly conflicting. 6 devices on one IRQ including the Live, my Geforce 2, both USB/VIA headers, ethernet card, and more. No matter what PCI I moved the Live card to, ACPI put all these devices to the same IRQ! After banging my head against the wall for days, I came across this at VIAhardware.com:

[cut/paste]
If you own a SBLive! and are experiencing the following symptoms:

Sound crackling

DMA issues

Sporadic system hangs

Data corruption

then you have a very good chance of alleviating these issues by changing your sound card to a Santa Cruz. The reasons for these issues are twofold: the crackling is the result of poorly designed drivers and the remaining symptoms are caused by a faulty ACPI firmware header on the Live! (note: the Live! 5.1 does not suffer from this problem and neither does the new Audigy).
[end cut/paste]

It seems to me that Creative put out a Lemon that was only noticable when system devices became so complex that it was noticable when your IRQ's filled up. I for one am going bitch to Creative and see what they will do. NOTE that this ACPI header problem is with standard Live cards and not the 5.1 Live or Audigy.

[ December 13, 2001: Message edited by: Darkwolven ]

I disabled the ACPI in my bios and my irq's are assigned at only 1 per card, voodoo card on 11, network card on 10, soundblaster live on 12, and ata on on 5, the only thing i have to do now is push the power button on my puter to turn it off. I have no trouble from my sounblaster live, there is a fix? at windows update for XP and the messenger stuff. Just a little help, maybe??

Oh and the Monster MX 300 works fine to, just unzip or copy the drivers to a folder you create and then use the update driver and point to the folder, this worked for me anyway

[ December 12, 2001: Message edited by: KAMIKAZEE ]

SB live sound cards seem to have problems with XP. I would return it and try another brand. I have heard good results from Phillips sound cards and Turtle Beach.

Woven--Your IRQ's wern't conflicting.
2k ACPI does the same thing-as it assigns IRQs. Most set ups with any hardware config. have no problem.
It is a soundblaster driver problem.
Disable ACPI computer type in Device Mangler is a workaround.Caution, for some boxes that creates a whole slew of othe problems.
There were pages and pages written on this subject on tec boards [IRQ assignment] when 2k first came out.
Pray for new soundblaster drivers-and video drivers.
Some video card drivers have an adverse effect on soundblaster drivers.
Promise drivers knock out my high end soundcard driver--so you also have to sometimes look past sound drivers to fix a soundcard problem.

No, you misunderstood me. The SB live standards have faulty ACPI firmware. It is this firmware header that HELPS ACPI in windows assign IRQ's and I hate to say it, but some sharing is normal, but NO version of windows should be sharing more than 3 devices per IRQ or [b:70e111de20]something is wrong[/b:70e111de20]. It doesn't matter if it is XP, 2000, or 98. There is a driver issue, but at this point the IRQ issue is much more serious, especially when it is sharing this IRQ with my network card and my video card and it was only AFTER putting in this card that the IRQ conflicts started. We have had two revisions of XP drivers for Live cards now and most of the driver bugs should be gone.(Both in XP and 98SE!) Keep in mind that this is only about Live Value, MP3, and gamers that are NOT 5.1 which would account why some people have problems and some do not. I suggest that anybody with a standard Live that IS having problems check their IRQ's. If the card is sharing IRQ's with more than a few devices then this is probably your problem.

Incidentally, the bios on my motherboard does not have an option to disable ACPI unfortunately. I have already been down that road, but thanks for the idea. Been through about 6 different drivers sets too. I did say I was troubleshooting for days. I wasn't kidding. ;)

I know that this is my problem and I put this here FYI.

[ December 13, 2001: Message edited by: Darkwolven ]

Unfortunately, viahardware.com is currently offline. Just in case it goes back online soon, the link is here: http://www.viahardware.com/scfaq.shtm


[quote:05adba90d0] Oh and the Monster MX 300 works fine to, just unzip or copy the drivers to a folder you create and then use the update driver and point to the folder, this worked for me anyway. [/quote:05adba90d0]

Strange. There are a bunch of people having problems with Monster MX300 cards and XP as well. Glad to hear it works for some. Maybe in that case it is a VIA hardware issue, but check the forums at vortexofsound.com and you will see plenty of people with problems with their Aureal based sound card and XP.

[ December 13, 2001: Message edited by: Darkwolven ]

Some say it's Via that's at fault: http://forums.viaarena.com/messagevi...&threadid=2476

Lots more: http://www.google.com/search?q=soundblaster+windows+XP+problem+IRQ&hl=en &start=0&sa=N