discardia

My gaming computer has been acting awfully strange since it’s recent upgrade. The sound card likes to take spontaneous shits all over my games and squeals like a pig getting called to the trough.

Soooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeeee!

And it squeals until I reboot the PC or turn off my speakers (which in reality, the squeal is still occurring, I just can’t hear it). The odd thing is that I have had this sound card for years, and it has been a great component. It is a Creative Audigy 2 Gamer, a decent card, a card that has lasted, and now it just up and dies at random intervals.

Sometimes I will be able to play for 2 minutes before it happens, other times 2 hours. The games change as well, it is not if I am playing the same thing all the time. The pattern is almost random.

So I decided to whip my forensics skills out and go hunting.

And what do I find?

It is a common error. Almost as well covered up as who shot JFK. (The other shooter was a Care Bear with a Springfield rifle on the grassy knoll, the blue Care Bare with a rainbow on his chest).

Turns out to be a very common error with completely random fixes. In one instance the Squeal of Death (SoD) was due to the manufacturer of the motherboard, and a bios update fixed it. In another case, the amount of pci bus (the amount of processing “room” for a card to talk to the motherboard/processor/memory) would fluctuate because of the video card, shoving the sound card off the proverbial cliff of logic error, and a new driver fixed it. Sometimes rebuilding the computer fixes it, sometimes applying drivers for sound, video and motherboard in a special order, sometimes sacrificing a chicken on the card before putting it back in.

I am stumped. The card worked great in two other computers and I have tried everything to get it working in this one. No dice.

Creative and their squeal of death strike again. I think my box is useless for gaming with it in there, so that obviously means that it has to come out.

Stupid SoB SoD.