Soundblaster audigy system lockup

[advocatexxx 0]

Just got a new SoundBlaster Audigy Gamer card and after installing it (and applying the latest drivers) I realize that whenever I run a program that uses EAX (Games, SoundBlaster Experience) the system randomly locks up. Sometimes after a few minutes, other times after an hour.

After going through some online search I found an article on the official Creative website which reads:

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">SYMPTOMS

While doing some activities that use the Sound Blaster Audigy card, the system may lock and emit a squealing sound from the speakers.

RESOLUTION

This can occur in some rare cases when the Sound Blaster Audigy has a conflict with another device in the system. There are various steps which may solve the problem. One or more of the following steps may correct it

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Now the Audigy retail box clearly supports Windows 2000 under its "Minimum System Requirements", and as such Creative knows that by default Windows 2000 configures the PC for ACPI (advanced configuration and power interface) which generally assigns IRQ 9 to most/if not all PCI devices.

So I went to my system information and saw that every PCI device on my computer is running on IRQ 9, which really hasen't caused any problems. I've had SoundBlaster Live! and it worked like a charm.

Why then is this Audigy locking up my system ? I own a Dell which doesn't let me specify PCI latency or IRQs in the BIOS, and since it's an ACPI Windows 2000 I have no way of changing them in the OS.

Any idea on how to solve this ? Thanks.

[Mister Frag 0]

You may want to try these drivers from Compaq's FTP site:

  <a href="" target="_blank">ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp21501-22000/SP21636.exe</a>

The drivers are for Audigy, Live! 5.1, and Live! cards under Windows XP and 2000. They are V5.12.2.252 of the Creative drivers, and seem to be the most stable drivers at the moment. There is a V6.12.1.253 patch floating out there that is supposed to contain a few fixes to this driver set, but the third digit of the version number went down, and applying it broke some of the CL applications like the mixer and speaker selection on my system.

[Edit]

One more note on installing the driver and applications: you'll get an error message after executing the file -- this is OK. After the setup program exits, find the CTOem.cfg file in the \Audio\Setup folder below the location that you extracted the files to, and delete the file. Then run the SETUP.EXE file in the same directory, and it will work fine.

[/Edit]

[mb_ 0]

maybe try to change from acpi-uniprocessor to standard-pc in hardware settings...

this helped in my case...

#mb_