Big problems with new soundblaster Z

[pieman109]

As title. I had one of these (oem) delivered from ocuk this afternoon, great I thought. I installed it correctly, disabled onboard sound in the bios (mobo in sig below), went to restart and straight away got a blue screen with "bad system config info" message.
Umpteen restarts , faffing about in safe mode, booting from a usb stick, repairing files and 6 six hours later, I've got a pc that'll boot most of the time, but will some times Bsod to that problem page. I know you can sometimes get these probs but, flippin' heck (my language at the time was lot coarser), I've never had this amount of ball ache from a hardware installation.
Anyone else had this, and if so, how did they reliably fix it?

 

[pieman109]

Well, the first thing I did was get the thing outta me pc, and clear all remnants of the drivers that I could find and the problems still continued. I used the latest drivers downloaded from creative but couldn't try 'em out 'cos I couldn't get into windows! I can safely say I won't be using any creative sound cards in the near future, and I realise that I might just have been unlucky, but after everything was uninstalled (both hardware and software) my problems are still continuing, so something has done the damage although I tend to think its a software issue but these were not installed before the bsods started.
Anyways, I'll not be using this hardware again and its going back to ocuk tomorrow.

 

[pieman109]

The bad system config error is nothing to do with the creative card, there was a previous problem with your PC and the install of the new card just pushed it over the edge. It's usually the sign of a failing hard drive and/or corrupt registry. Sometimes it's faulty memory. What tends to happen is exactly what happened with you, install new hardware, which writes changes to the registry, registry is already corrupt so when you reboot you get a blue screen.

do you have windows 7 or windows 10? Try booting into safe mode and checking the hard drive for errors. If you have windows 10, try the automatic repair. There are other things you can do, BCD repair, Repairing the registry by overwriting the current system files with backups. Or just resetting windows 10.

How do I do a complete reinstal of windows 10 64bit and still leave all my documents, games, email setup, etc (windows live mail, I know, no-one likes it but we've become so used to it its difficult to try summat else)

 

[pieman109]

Cheers for that mate.