Vista broke Audigy2 or was it the other way around?

Jono · 17 Sep 2007 at 12:01

I Thought I'd give vista another go since creative released some vista drives for the Audigy2 that I've had since 2003. It's served me well under XP.

Anyway, installed vista ultimate, then the drivers... rebooted hooray!
No, not hooray, it got as far as loading windows up until the little bar animation under windows logo (Vista loading screen, I suppose, is what I'm trying to describe) then fell over. Rebooted itself... and kept doing this.

Tried booting it into safe mode - no joy, same thing. Got so far then fell over.

Went back to XP - installed the drivers from the Audigy2 CD that came with the card... fine. Windows update decided it had some newer drivers, so I thought I'd try to install them. Rebooted, windows loading screen.... bonk. Dead. Looked like a quick flash of a BSOD then rebooted... meh!

But I managed to get into XP in safe mode, uninstalled the drivers via control panel, rebooted and reinstalled the originals - it's fine.

I don't want to use the onboard sound on my motherboard because, quite frankly, it's ****. I will go out and buy a new soundcard, but first I would like to know if anyone has any idea why anything other than ancient drivers on XP kills my PC.

Anyone got an old Audigy2 running under vista with no issues? Which drivers are you using?

RaiderX · 17 Sep 2007 at 12:12

i had an audigy 2 working fine in vista, even EAX worked.

londonbairn · 17 Sep 2007 at 12:13

I have an Audigy 4 under Vista with no problems. Proper 7.1 etc. I have to say though, that the drivers you wanna get are from the US site, not the UK. When you go to the Drivers page, select North America. When I select the older drivers under Europe, I have loads of issues, media players crashing and sound suddenly stopping. Try those see how it goes.

marc2003 · 17 Sep 2007 at 12:15

hehe, i had exactly the same problem with windows update. i didn't even ask it to update my drivers but it did and caused a BSOD for me as well.

i find the official vista drivers for audigy2 cards to give crap sound quality although they should work.

instead, i'm using the download for x-fi cards. you use winrar to unpack the .exe and inside the resulting folder should be called a subfolder called setup. run the setup.exe from within that and that should work fine.

microsoft did break quite a lot with vista's new sound system - no more directsound which means they broke eax in games. creative have released a workaround called alchemy. it's free for x-fi users but they expect audigy users to pay for it. the cheeky ********. luckily they don't mind someone posting a free version in their forums.

http://forums.creative.com/creative...essage.id=18972&view=by_date_ascending&page=1