John said:
Hi
I recently installed Vista. My audio card is SoundBlaster Live! Value. This
card is on the original list of unsupported devices so no driver was
installed during initial vista set-up. However after running windows update
the driver was installed as apparently a driver has been released recently.
The problem is that sound is not good and specially gets cranky at high
volume. Is there a solution to this?
Forgive me if this posts twice - I had a glitch with sending it the
first time.
I have some fairly old notes from a newsgroup post about getting SB
Live! cards to work in Vista. The notes are probably from February or
March and please note that since I don't have an SB Live! card in my
Vista box I haven't tried this. YMMV. That said, here they are:
*****
Get SB Live! cards to work with Vista from a post on the newsgroups (the
"speaker" is the poster):
I came across a method on a blog by a person calling themselves 'I'm mad
as hell'. The reason I'm posting their method here is not only because
it works
flawlessly in Vista (32bit) but it also solved for me an issue I had
with the generic SB Live driver where I would lose all sound coming out
of Sleep mode.
You'll need the XP SB Live driver exe called LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe.
Googling for "LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe brought several links, including
one at a Creative site so d/l it from there. It is a 23.3MB file. Here
are the steps in his/her own words - follow them to the letter:
1. Get LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe from Creative's web site
2. Run the installer, it will display the checking CRC window
3. It will then tell you it can't find an SB card - oh yeah? Leave the
dialog alone, we need it there for the moment
4. Owing to the magic way the installer works it has already unpacked
all the driver files onto your hard disk, as soon as the installer exits
it will delete them - so don't let that installer exit yet
5. Open an Explorer window, navigate to %USER%\AppData\Local\Temp and
look for the most recently created directory (mine was called CRF000.
There will be an Audio\Drivers directory under it, navigate to this
directory. (BTW substitute %USER% with your user name)
6. Copy the path from the path bar at the top of your Explorer window.
7. Now open the Device Manager (Windows key+Break), select the 'unknown
audio' device, right click and then select 'Update Driver Software' and then
'Browse my computer for software'.
8. Now paste the path to the driver into the text box and press next.
The driver should now install. That's it!
*****
Malke
