Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests SB Live Value compatibility with win2k pro?

i read the following on the internet, any truth to this?


Warning

Although the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! line of PCI sound adapters are immensely popular, we cannot recommend them. We have many reports of poor audio quality, compatibility problems, and system crashes attributable to a Sound Blaster Live! sound adapter. We have experienced these problems ourselves on Windows 9X and Windows 2000 systems, despite loading the latest drivers and doing everything else we could think of to resolve them, including fiddling with PCI latency. These problems are documented on public messageboards, the USENET comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.* and microsoft.public.win2000.* newsgroups, and elsewhere. Note that although these problems are most common with the Live! boards, they also occur with earlier boards such as the AWE32.

The usual symptoms are crackling sound, dropouts, DMA problems, bluescreens, and sporadic system crashes, including blackscreen crashes to a hard reboot. The problems seem most common on motherboards that use VIA KT-133 family chipsets, but we have seen similar problems on motherboards that use non-VIA chipsets, including the remarkably stable Intel i440BX and 815 chipsets. Although the problems don't show up on every system and are sometimes not reproducible, they are common enough that we consider them systemic. Problems seem most likely to occur on overclocked systems, systems with ACPI enabled, and systems that have a high-performance video card, although we have seen the problem occur on vanilla Intel 440BX and 815-based systems that were not overclocked, did not use ACPI, and used only embedded video.

The only solution we know of is to remove the Sound Blaster Live! card, go in with fire and sword to eradicate all Creative Labs drivers, and install a different sound adapter. Unfortunately, the Creative Labs drivers are very persistent, and a simple uninstall leaves drivers and registry entries that may cause continued problems. Doing a repair or upgrade installation of the operating system isn't enough. The only sure way we know to solve the problem is to back up your data, fdisk your hard drive, and reinstall the operating system and all applications from scratch.



so, what do you all think? i have a 4 speaker setup that used to work fine under me, i recently upgraded my computer and switched to win2k pro in the process. now the rear speakers dont output, and whenever i try to get into the creative software - the mixer or diagnostics, etc, the app locks up. also, the post got me to thinking, i have had intermittent lockups while playing games - war3, morrowind for example, where the system freezes and repeats the last bit of sound over and over again. not sure if this is sound card related or not - what do you all think? was considering upgrading to a nice turtle beach card, ive heard good things about them.

edit: sorry guys, just realized how long that post was. thanks for taking the time to read it.

I have that sound card in my machine and I am running 2k pro with no problems. My friend whom I bought the card from was running 2k pro as well, and didn't have any probs

I had a problem with Win2k and my SB Live! MP3 locking up games as well. I would try to play Fallout: Tactics and it would lock the game up constantly, playing the same sound over and over. Also when I'd use my Neo Geo emulator to play Samurai Shodown III (NeoRageX, it's great! I have every NeoGeo game ever made in ROM format too), the sound would be terrible. None of this happened in WinME or Win98.

I have an old SB Live Value..like the first iteration of it. I've run it on a i440BX mobo and it's in a via kt133 based board right now. I've had windows 98, ME and XP on this system. I've NEVER had a problem with the card. Hands down best sound card I've ever owned.

EDIT: I notice this was posted on an IBM newsgroup...general rule of thumb is that IBM computers suck! sans the thinkpad which is probably the greatest laptop ever created, and even those have their quirks sometiems.

I gave up on the Live working properly with the Via chipsets a long long time ago. It worked ok for the most part, but I would get the occasional blue screen. I dumped the Via chipset motherboard and the Live for an Nforce and haven't looked back.

yeah I have bad problems with crackling if I hook up my rear 2 speakers in win2k with the latest version of the drivers/software from creative on my SB live value I have tried all the PCI timing and other stuff that could help and nothing does so far and this is on a KT133 MB. I do not have this problem with older vortex 2 based soundcards that I used to use.

For TheGreatOne : comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.* is a newgroup for IBM compatable PC's (so just about everything with an intel chip in it) not just IBM the company's PC's

buy a turtle beach santa cruz! You will be very impressed, and they are priced very well, if the santa cruz is too pricey for you look into a fortissimo II, not as nice as the santa cruz but still a good card for what little cash it costs.
Never heard of any problems with them and VIA.

Had SB Live! Value in my box running Win2k pro until just recently when I decided to upgrade to the Audigy. My box is Via KT133... no problems whatsoever with the sound.

FWIW, IMHO... the older first and second generation of SB live! cards had better sound quality. Seems like their putting too much stuff and too many features on such a small card ( remember the size of the SB AWE 32 Gold?!? )

--JamesT

I never had problems with mine under 2k once they got finalized drivers for it. only problems I had before was with some video games.