Distorted sound after installing Vista Home Premium

[Tracy W.]

I just installed Vista Home Premium onto my pc, and everything seems to be
running ok, except for the sound. No matter what application I run, my sound
seems to skip a lot. It's most noticeable when listening to music or TV.
Various media players don't make a difference, and it acts like my pc is
starving for resources. I've got a 3.2Ghz cpu w/2Gb of memory and plenty of
hard drive space. 256Mb ATI video card, and Audigy sound card, but it looks
like Vista makes the applications run off of the virtual memory, even when
nothing else is running. Is anyone having issues like this? Any
suggestions? I've disabled services and features till I'm blue in the face.
Nothing seems to help, although increasing CPU priority for the process seems
to make it better, but it's still skipping.

Thanks,

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Have you updated the audio driver? You don't say which Audigy audio device
you have.

 

[Spirit]

Check to be sure you have the latest Sound Drivers for Vista.

Try disabling ALL enhancements, see the Section "How does loudness
equalization work?"

 

[Tracy W.]

I had installed a Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer card with the latest
drivers, but no change. I also upgraded my CPU from the 3.2Ghz single-core
to a 2.2Ghz Dual Core. It helped, but I still get the skips. I blew it all
away over the weekend, and reinstalled Vista. The issue is better, but it
still skips, especially when I'm trying to run any other application, like IE
or email. I didn't put the SB card in this time, so I'm on the Realtek HD
Audio card which is built into the M/B. I have the latest drivers from
Realtek, but it's still skipping. Very frustrating to say the least. It
acts like it's resource related, but it has plenty of resources. CPU is not
busy at all, hard drives are good, plenty of memory, etc.... It's an ASRock
M/B which is rated for Vista, so I'm at a loss.

 

[Tracy W.]

Actually, I was able to resolve it last night. Turns out to be the RAID
driver for my VIA RAID controller. I had the latest version installed (which
was supposed to support Vista), but I un-installed it and went back to the
version I used with Win2k, and it solved the problem. This was the most
expensive troubleshooting job I've gone through, but the PC sure screams now,
w/o stuttering!

Thanks for all of the suggestions.