VIA, Win2k, and Aureal Soundcard problems....

[jamesey]

my friend just built a new computer with the
ABIT KT7A,
AMD 1.2 GHZ,
IBM 60GXP,
GF2 Ultra
some RAM
and
the Aureal Vortex card.

His sound initially would not work so he decided to fix that after installing the latest Win2k service pack. During the installation he blue screened and now he cant even boot into safe mode.

anyone know what's up with that?

Are there any other patches he needs to make sure everything runs properly, like stuff from VIA or Aureal?

 

[McCarthy]

Sounds like he may have a pretty new install so reinstalling to get the OS going again won't be a big bother. As for Aureal in W2K, yeah, it can work, but it's really not worth the trouble IMO.

www.vortexofsound.com (I think) used to have guides on how to get sound working better, but at this point I'd say just get a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and move on. I have an MX300, always have liked it, but even after boot up tweaks, following guides, all that, I'm still getting tons of pops and laggy audio all the time when I try doing anything beyond Windows system prompts in W2k.

Anyway, wouldn't buy a Creative card. Between them screwing up so there's a problem with some VIA chipsets (yeah, supposed to be fixed, some still say it isn't, why bother) and them being the ones to run Aureal out of business and buy up the assetts, abandoning all current owners with instant death to driver updates, I say to **** with them.