After almost 7 years, I thought it was time to replace my aging original Sound Blaster Audigy Plantnium. It had served me well, but was showing its age in high end games. I never really used the front 5.25" bay for anything other than a headphone jack, back in the day I thought I might record some of dad's 45's.
So with $150 in Best Buy gift cards, I decided to upgrade. I went with the X-FI Fatality Professional card, and thus the 'adventure' began. I got home, uninstalled the software and drivers for my Audigy. I knew I would run into a snag, because if there is one company worse at drivers than ATI, its Creative by a landslide.
Installed the new card (physically), booted up and windows detected etc. Installed the software and drivers which took as long as installing/updating BF2 (for anyone who has played that, its a long f'in time). Went to reboot and figure, "Wow that was painless." Booted up, didn't here any sounds. Went to media player, nothing - no audio device found. Checked Hardware manager, everything was there with no warnings etc. So went to update the drivers. Another long install later I rebooted. Still nothing.
In the Hardware manager, the card is present. But in Windows sound control I got a no audio device. So, I unistalled everything, took the card out and reinstalled. Nothing. Did it a second time, nothing. Now I'm thinking IRQ conflicts or somehow my onboard audio turned itself on. Uninstalled again, swapped PCI slot positions, installed. Rebooted etc, still nothing. It was now 11pm* and I said 'f' it, creative's gonna get a call tomorrow.
*Headache counter: 90 minutes
After searching the internet for a bit, I tried every solution I could find, making sure windows processes were on etc.. Nothing worked. I needed to reboot from a windows update which I did. Amazingly, upon the reboot, I had sound.
Now as much as I hated this 90 minute process, I was pleasantly surprised on the audio quality upgrade. I'd consider myself an amateur audiophile and it added a new depth to my sennheiser headpones. I was worried I wouldn't notice a quality difference (maybe a FPS difference) since no reviews compared an original Audigy to the X-FI, plus when reading an article, it's hard to describe sound.
