major problems-XP-Audigy

[Pabster]

Why does everyone always blame Creative?

Audigy is a great card ... many, many people are using them without a hitch.

The fault lies, once again, with faulty VIA core logic. I also experienced similiar issues with Audigy and KT266A.

Quit making excuses for VIA. I don't see such issues with other chipsets

 

[sandorski]

Pabster: It's getting old.

 

[etcetera]

Just spent an hour on the phone with Creative tech support. They had me boot into safe mode and remove the audigy software, then search for the file 'emu10k' and delete it. Rebooted normally and canceled all the windows' request to do hardware/driver install. Put in audigy cd and right click to 'search' for file 'ctzapxx.exe'. Executed and this forced the install of audigy drivers only. The windows system from time to time asked for various drivers and .dll files (gamenum, ks, etc.) and these were all easy to find (in my system) on: C:>windows>system32 and some were in the next level down >drivers. I then had sound, however when I rebooted, I had the same problem ie. windows xp would not load...just a blank black screen. Tech support then had me change my card to a different pci slot and I have the same problem...no sound and no audigy card installed (according to the computer) although device manager shows it there. At that point the Creative guy was stumped and suggested I might have a bad card. I don't know why my card would not work on a reboot but it will if I wait 15 minutes. Cold boots are fine. I'm guessing its more like a motherboard/SB/via chip combo....!

 

[Pabster]

Sandorski wrote:

"Pabster: It's getting old."

Yeah, it's getting a little old listening to the limitless excuses for the plethora of issues which surround VIA core logic, including KT266A.

Call me whatever you like, flame me, whatever. The facts speak for themselves.

 

[Mem]

<< The fault lies, once again, with faulty VIA core logic. I also experienced similiar issues with Audigy and KT266A. >>



Pabster you are a wrong as usual your VIA flaming is getting tiresome look at my sig, SB Audigy and KT266A board working well together .

 

[tboo]

Its getting old hearing somebody blame either creative OR via-many people, including myself, have no problems with the KT266/KT266a chipset & the audigy.

 

[|TOAST|]

Well I am not blaming myself... its taken days and I've tried many a PCI latency numbers... I've also tried all but slot 1 since the card won't fit into slot 1 due to a large capacitor that blocks this large card... Why won't my Audigy install? I don't know but for now I blame creative since VIA and this chipset have not given me any problems... I've also tried this card with a new hard drive from Seagate (80Gb Barracuda 4 on IDE onboard 1) and not the Promise FastTrak100 TX2 controller card in there at all... I mean I installed the The hard drive without any other communication devices in there (thikning 3com's 3C905-TX and Linksys 100TX and D-Link's 550TX were all at fault at sometime) but that is not the case... I have plenty of IRQ's (I know that sounds sketchy but when you disable onboard sound and teh game port and both COM ports and a parallel port you have enough). So then what do you tinkn the problem is? I'll tell you where I think it lies... They didn't do enough writing and distributing the drivers. They lack in WIN2K and the fact taht they only give you an exe file that has to check for the card (when its properly installed and not buggily installed). They need to make a zipped folder of the drivers so I can force them through manual install... that's the problem I believe. I've reinstalled teh WIN2K OS 12 times now and it doesn't work. Not for me. Maybe I got a lemon but one that plays sound and does the same thing so many have had problems similar to this with until they get teh updated drivers in there somehow? I doubt it. That driver fix works and they should fix this first released driver since it supports WIN2K... I hate to do this but I'll have to try WIN98SE and WIN XP Pro (I haven't tried these because I'm also studying for my MCSE for WIN2K and I would also like my computers to be running that OS and not need to reboot every tiem I want to watch a DVD or hear surround sound. Creative can go disappear from my monetary support with my private business if they can't fix this with their on the phone support. If this card only works with certain OSes because they can't provide a way for me to extract teh correct update to drivers for WIN2K then they will not receive my business through teh machines I build for customers. That's teh end of that. I'll keep you all posted about this working under different OSes... we'll see and I'll advise you people...

 

[|TOAST|]

OK, I hate to bring up old posts but as I said I would get back to you on the situation with my Audigy Platinum. I put the card into a system that I've had stable for years and on a chipset that is known NOT to have issues similar to teh 686b from VIA (whih after doing some digging I believe the problem was that Creative wrote drivers taht were out of spec with teh PCI 2.1 compliance white papers, therefore requiring a bunch of updates for BIOS's of boards with this chip and many 4-in-1 updates as well to allow users to set their PCI latency so that the card would run with the incorrectly designed drivers... I don't how true this is but i believe I found that at the VIA Arena articles and supposedly this should NOT be a problem with the Audigy and other VIA chipsets). I installed teh card into my P3 500MHz on a BX board system and the same thing happened. Tried all the PCI slots and assigning IRQs so as to prevent sharing. I even installed WIN98SE in this machine and still the exact same problem occurs. No sound out the rear outputs and no driver updates will run since the card is not detected. Also Rcman.exe (remote manager) crashes on boot up every time (I'm guessing that this program crashes since it doesn't find the card and therefore would not find the Audigy drive attahed to nor the infrared receiver for teh remote). After 6 hours of phoning Creative's tech support at various hours of the day (open-close) the fastest time I got for a representative actaully picking up teh phone was 57 minutes. Three of my calls took so long to get a representative on teh phone that I ran out of battery juice on my cordless and got cut off (the wait time was somewhere upwards of 90minutes for all three of these calls). the first representative I got through to was befuddled and quickly (first 5 minutes) put me on hold and tehn I got cut off while on hold (not due to a battery energy shortage). I called back from a corded phone and got a nice and helpful representative who suggested I try getting a new CD since he was certain that WIN98SE installing the WDM drivers was an incorrect installation (I install the sound card only from the creative CD's installation program and not with windows new hardware found wizard) he seemed to think that either I got the wrong CD (Audigy for MP3+ or Gamer etc) and not the one intended for teh Platinum/Platinum Ex. Funny i should ge teh wrong CD from a sealed Retail box. Oh well hope this works otherwise I'm RMAing the card and drive and getting a new one which should hopefully clear things up. If that is the case sorry to make so many posts and be a pain in teh arse. Just want to give some closure. This problem does not pertain to VIA or their chipset as I posted above. thanks.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

<<

<< The fault lies, once again, with faulty VIA core logic. I also experienced similiar issues with Audigy and KT266A. >>



Pabster you are a wrong as usual your VIA flaming is getting tiresome look at my sig, SB Audigy and KT266A board working well together . >>



I'm another happy KT266A + Audigy user. In my case on a Soyo Dragon +. With that board, you just have to be careful to use PCI slot 4 or 5. I'm very happy with the card.

 

[Pabster]

Folks, I'm pleased as punch that you've been able to get your Audigy working with 8233. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of others are not so lucky. No matter how much you'd like to believe KT266A/8233 is "the" combination, it is issues like this which cause a lot of people endless hours of frustration -- and many more end up leaving AMD, and spending considerably more for less with an Intel solution. VIA needs to get their ass in gear and do a little more homework on their chipsets. Had they not rushed out the gate with KT266A (to counter SiS' stellar 735 release), they might have been able to work out a few quirks. Unfortunately, they didn't, and unless something drastic changes ... expect KT333, as well as the forthcoming 8233A to suffer from similiar "issues". In fact, 8233A has already been identified as having severe issues with Windows XP. It'll be interesting to see how it works out when the first board(s) featuring this new VIA south bridge roll out. So far, Soltek is the first I'm seen with the DRV4. Shuttle's AK35GTR was to feature it as well, but (according to Shuttle, not me) it will not, due to the issues which have been identified with 8233A already. Perhaps VIA has "fixed" this in a later batch/revision. We'll see.

 

[Hungryforinfo]

I only skimmed the above posts (wow, lots of responses to the Audigy problems)

I had simillar problems that I finally resolved. I originally did a driver update to XP audigy drivers which crashed my system, afterwhich I had to reformat.
I could not get my Audigy card to work anymore (I was using windows XP, Audigy was OEM version). I finally got it to work by removing it from my computer, doing a reformat and reload of windows XP, updated windows, loaded all video card drivers, then installed the card. Windows detected the new hardware, but could not find the appropriate drivers. I installed the software/drivers from the Audigy disk, then updated all drivers to XP version. All is fine now. I can't believe it took about 10 installs to finally get the "right way" to install this card. All previous attempts managed to bring Windows XP to it's knees making it totally unusable.

I hope this helps someone

Mark

 

[Brian48]

I've installed 3 of these Audigy under WinXP already. One on an Epox 8K7A+, ECS K7S5A, and KA7-100. Not a single problem in each case. Simply made sure the card wasn't in a slot that was sharing an IRQ with another device and then installed with the Win2k drivers off the CD, after which, I promptly installed the WinXP update after a reboot. Never had a problem with the SBLive either in all the machines I've built for myself and friends.

This might sound simplistic, but have you checked Creative's WinXP FAQ regarding this yet?

 

[|TOAST|]

Thanks but I've reinstalled WIN2K at least 16 times now on BX and KT266A solutions and done that over hours and hours of 5 different reps at Creative (because its a non 800 number I gotta pay for long distance for about 12+ hours of phone conversations). None of them could even remotely get this to work in WIN98SE or WIN2K Pre & Post SP2. The card would not be detected by any of the software that came with either the Audigy card or the new CD of Audigy stuff they sent me (exact same CD... just wanted to verify that it wasn't the CD that was causing improper installtion of the software). Using it with either sharing IRQ's or not sharing IRQ's (even specified and tried IRQ3, 4, 5, 7, and 10) in 10 different PCI slots at several different latency settings (32, 64, etc.), nothing worked. The programs crash because they do not detect the presence of the Audigy card. The updated drivers do not install because of the lack of presence/detection of the Audigy card. I only get stereo front two channel outputs if I select 4 speaker mode or 5.1 mode. But I only get stereo output for 2 channels. If I select stereo or 2 speaker mode, then NO sound is output. The drivers install correctly in WIN2K and WIN98SE on both KT266A and BX board machines according to device manager. Both do the same crap as above. Creative got tired of dealing with me and RMA'd the card and drive. Next Friday or the week after I will receive the new card after they detect a hardware failure of the card or drive I send back to them... They are investigating it currently.

Sorry this reply is 5 days later but since this is the 16th clean install just for this KT266A board system, I haven't gotten around to setting up email (for the 16th time) on this system.

 

[|TOAST|]

Today Creative verified that the SB Audigy board was defective (claimed there was a "AUDIO SUBSYSID ERROR!"). So that settles it. I retract all nasty comments toward them except for the fact that you have to wait 1 hour to talk to any tech support rep and you gotta pay for that phone call unless you live near them (long idstance charges). Sorry to bring this old thread up but just wanted some closure on it for future references and ppl searching for similar Audigy problems.

 

[rahvin]

<<Folks, I'm pleased as punch that you've been able to get your Audigy working with 8233. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of others are not so lucky. No matter how much you'd like to believe KT266A/8233 is "the" combination, it is issues like this which cause a lot of people endless hours of frustration -- and many more end up leaving AMD, and spending considerably more for less with an Intel solution. >>

Pabster, do you bother to read anything in a thread when going into one of your VIA diatribes? Have you read the posters message that the audigy is having the problem with a BX motherboard as well?

TOAST, glad you got the RMA on the bad board. Didn't notice the thread ealier but if you were having the problem with two seperate computers it's definately the soundcard.

 

[Aquaman]

I've got almost the exact config as you but I didn't put my computer together myself THe Audigy works fine for me.

Cheers.
Aquaman

 

[Mem]

|TOAST| well I`m glad you finally found the problem,never had a faulty sound card myself but there`s always the first time .

Btw my SB Audigy is still working sweet(100% stability).

 

[Soccerman]

I'd like to take this opportunaty to say that it's great that at least ONE problem was solved. bad card.

Pabster, you still there? guess what? it was a BAD CARD, not a faulty chipset that blows up in your face every time you use it

 

[|TOAST|]

hehe... I knew some of you guys would take the opportunity too...



I sincerely posted this for closure's sake and not to supply ammo for harrassing other people (although that whole saga has amused me but I'm completely happy with my VIA chipset and was personally tentative for using one for myself because of things people say like that about VIA and their products).

Also to clear my name since I'm embarrassed to not be able to get a piece of hardware working that I buy (especially after having built hundreds of systems on a variety of platforms for friends, family and small businesses). Well I haven't received the replacement but that should be tomorrow and hoperfully I can get it working. Cheers!