One day my friend Tom asked my help to repair his computer. Then I checked the machine for him.
Tom has a computer with An ASUS P4P800 SE motherboard, integrated ADI AD1985 AC97 audio control chips and the SoundMax driver powering his audio device. This configuration is very practical and enough for him, but there is a fly in the ointment—the audio driver he installed from the disk that comes with main board has some glitches: every time when certain “big scene” emerges, for example: an explosion scene in a DVD movie or when audiences are shouting in the game Real Football 2009, there are always some pops coming with the sound card.
Before Tom turns to me, he tried to fix the problem by himself. First, he thought of audio drivers update, and then he surfed on websites for audio driver downloads, got the up-to-date SoundMax driver for Windows 2000/XP, downloaded and zipped it immediately, double-click to install the files, however, after a while, the system prompted no hardware had been found and the files can not be installed. Then according to the specific path in the Device Manager Tom updated this driver again but still failed. Finally he had no choice but unloaded the old driver and reinstalled it, the result was the same.
When we come up against such a problem like Tom’s, I recommend to scrutinize it from several parts thereinafter:
First of all, open the audio device’s Properties in Device Manager to see its details: (for example in Windows XP) click on Start and select Control Panel, click Performance and Maintenance and then click System, choose Hardware and click Device Manager, the next double-click Sound, video and game controllers then the audio device will be in the below list, right click the audio device and choose Properties and select details.
Note the ID number, e.g. my audio device ID is “pciven_8086&dev_24D5&subsys_80F31043”. Open the “SMAXWDA” folder in the driver programs we just download, pick up “W2K_XP” folder, and open “SMWDMVI3.inf” file in the notepad, find out the “[AnalogDevices]” item, below this item in the same format type the ID Number we just note down.
Lastly, save this file and set up a proper audio driver. Thereby the previous error would not happen again.
After we install the new diver, we finally can wave bye to the pops and would never suffer the twitters in Real Football. Users with the same motherboard and who can not update the SoundMax drivers would as well take this approach.
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