Is my soundcard dieing?

IceShock · 15 Nov 2013 at 22:53

Okay, iv got a soundblaster fatal1ty fps x-fi thingy-ma-bob, had it since 2004-2005 ish? and basically, sometimes, when iv got say windows media player open, and a game, all of a sudden the sound will go really strange and only come out of lets say the rear speakers instead of the full 5.1, and if i close windows media player, re open it, some times its the same, some times its back to usual, but even though windows media player is, my game, everything will be all lop sided, like sound thats supposed to come out of left ear phones, come out of the right and stuff like that. and all apps with sound do different things once this happens. if you reboot, then all is fine and it might not do it for another few days. some times it can be a few hours, but usually, well it started about 8 months ago really, does it about once per 3 weeks, now it does it around 3 times per week. just at random times, sound will all get muddled up.

know this is probibly a bad explination but anyone else had this before? lol

thanks.

Marine-RX179 · 16 Nov 2013 at 00:30

I think it's time for you to give the old man an honourable retirement

Just go and get a Sound Blaster Z...can be have at around £60 if you look around.

IceShock · 16 Nov 2013 at 02:16

haha, lol sounds like a plan, well when this problem, if it is a factor of it dieing out, when it gets too annoying to cope with, ill just get something that does every thing that it does now

lol, or what it doesn't does when it decides to try jump in its coffin too early!

Bubo · 16 Nov 2013 at 11:11

My Xfi spontaneously decided to completely mute istelf the other day. After trying to coax it back to life I uninstalled the drivers and tried to reinstall them, only to find they refused to accept I had an Xfi in my system. Windows had it down as a generic sound card in device manager for some reason. These were the official drivers btw. So I tried the PAX drivers I had heard about before and all is well now. Don't know if some recent windows update caused this or just driver corruption, but it may be worth you trying the PAX drivers yourself.

IceShock · 17 Nov 2013 at 22:01

Bubo said:
My Xfi spontaneously decided to completely mute istelf the other day. After trying to coax it back to life I uninstalled the drivers and tried to reinstall them, only to find they refused to accept I had an Xfi in my system. Windows had it down as a generic sound card in device manager for some reason. These were the official drivers btw. So I tried the PAX drivers I had heard about before and all is well now. Don't know if some recent windows update caused this or just driver corruption, but it may be worth you trying the PAX drivers yourself.

Thanks for this! just installed them 3 hrs ago, because all today this weird thing that kept happening was happening every 20 mins it got so much worse haha from once every few days to once every 20 mins, these drivers have sorted everything out, and no idea how but my audio sounds great, got that great sound again and feeling like when my sound card was brand new. its a lot crisper, more defiant. love it.