Nice EBay deal on SB Live 5.1
Got a nice deal on a SB Live 5.1 card off of EBay. Only $10 with shipping. It was advertised as a Sound Blaster 128 card. I just wanted to get a card that had support for rear speakers since I got a Creative 4.1 surround sound speaker set for Christmas from my mom. I'm not a big audio fanatic, so I had just been using the stereo sound that came built into the motherboard on my PC. So I was very surprised to see the card was even better than the one advertised.
I have had a little trouble with it though. I think there is some sort of resource conflict. Most likely with my NIC. What happens is, every time I start my computer up, I am not on the Internet. What I have to do is go into the network connection properties in XP and disable the connection, then re-enable it. Then it works fine. But, I have to do this every time I restart. I tried moving the NIC to another PCI slot, but that didn't help.
My solution to that for the time being is to use the onboard NIC. The story for that is a strange one too. My PC came with an onboard NIC like many PC's do now. Remember that big power outage that hit the northeast in '03? Well, I was on the edge of the outage (my town didn't lose any power, but many of the nearby cities did.) Instead, we had just lost power for a few minutes, then go hit with a nice surge. I have surge protectors on all my equipment, but maybe they are getting old or something. Because my speakers on my PC made a deafening screeching sound. Then I noticed my NIC was no longer working. I quickly replaced it with a PCI NIC to get back on the Internet. But, I then realized from time to time my onboard NIC was recognized by Windows. What happens is, if I restart the PC, the NIC is gone. If I completely shut down, then it will return on next start up. Annoying, since I usually just restart because I don't want to wait for a shutdown to occur to restart. It takes about three minutes for this piece of shit to shutdown.
So, anyways, I at least have a backup network solution for the time being. But, the sound is still having some trouble. It keeps having this trouble where every 20 seconds or so, it will freeze up for a second and make a terrible jittering sound. This makes listening to music impossible. I have already uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers and even updated my motherboard drivers. I think the next step is a Windows reinstall. Not just because of this, the whole computer is just running like crap lately. Too many programs installed and a number that have been removed, but probably not all the way. Somehow almost 35GB of this drive has been taken up, and that is in less than a year. I have other drives filled with data from the past. What is taking up all that space?? :\ I have no idea.
I have had a little trouble with it though. I think there is some sort of resource conflict. Most likely with my NIC. What happens is, every time I start my computer up, I am not on the Internet. What I have to do is go into the network connection properties in XP and disable the connection, then re-enable it. Then it works fine. But, I have to do this every time I restart. I tried moving the NIC to another PCI slot, but that didn't help.
My solution to that for the time being is to use the onboard NIC. The story for that is a strange one too. My PC came with an onboard NIC like many PC's do now. Remember that big power outage that hit the northeast in '03? Well, I was on the edge of the outage (my town didn't lose any power, but many of the nearby cities did.) Instead, we had just lost power for a few minutes, then go hit with a nice surge. I have surge protectors on all my equipment, but maybe they are getting old or something. Because my speakers on my PC made a deafening screeching sound. Then I noticed my NIC was no longer working. I quickly replaced it with a PCI NIC to get back on the Internet. But, I then realized from time to time my onboard NIC was recognized by Windows. What happens is, if I restart the PC, the NIC is gone. If I completely shut down, then it will return on next start up. Annoying, since I usually just restart because I don't want to wait for a shutdown to occur to restart. It takes about three minutes for this piece of shit to shutdown.
So, anyways, I at least have a backup network solution for the time being. But, the sound is still having some trouble. It keeps having this trouble where every 20 seconds or so, it will freeze up for a second and make a terrible jittering sound. This makes listening to music impossible. I have already uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers and even updated my motherboard drivers. I think the next step is a Windows reinstall. Not just because of this, the whole computer is just running like crap lately. Too many programs installed and a number that have been removed, but probably not all the way. Somehow almost 35GB of this drive has been taken up, and that is in less than a year. I have other drives filled with data from the past. What is taking up all that space?? :\ I have no idea.