when i play bf2142 and enable hardware sound, then enable EAX for my audigy se, it messes the sound up pretty bad. I can hear little clicks and electronic whirrs everywhere, it's hard to describe but i know it's not part of the game and it's very annoying, and it does it whether i'm around action or by myself. The game announcer that says things like "We're losing this battle, fight harder men!!" is completely choppy and broken up, like talking on a bad cellphone connection. When he talks it also seems to chop the whole game up framerate wise. The other voices like the soldiers on my team seem ok. Disabling EAX fixes the problem, i've tried this online and offline and in different maps.

I just bought this card from walmart, but noticed that the instruction book had been used before, and the screwhole to screw the card into the case's expansion slot has an engraving where someone has already put a screw in it. So it's obviously a return. Is this problem I'm having with my computer, or could it be the reason this card was returned before?

I always have junk disabled. I'll try the registry cleaner now that someone has suggested a good one, but i never mess with them cause they have messed me up in the past.

Also just to throw this in there, loading screens seem much slower than i had hoped for this new system, but when it actually loads it plays great. WoW plays good, but it's actually the worst playing game I hve right now. I run BF2142 with all settings enabled better than i do WoW right now with all of it enabled. I also think BF has a bit of AA and AF on too. The only reason i can think of for that is that WoW streams from the hard drive more and has no loading screens. It has nothing to do with this post, but I am very disappointed by the performance of F.E.A.R. compared to other games. I would think a game that's older like it is would play better and look better, but it just doesn't look so great even with the settings as high as they go, and the frames suffer. Half Life 2 totally blows it out of the water in gfx and performance and it's a lot older. Could be that I'm using Ati.

to the guy that asked, I don't think it's an older model HDD. I bought this computer in 05, all I can tell from the back of the HDD without checking serial numbers and all is "Western Digital Enhanced IDE Hard Disk Drive"

I just bought a new computer C2D E6420, 2GB 800mhz ram, radeon x1950xt etc.... it's all great, and it runs fast. But certain things like windows startup, firefox startup, and just running certain things where it has to access the HDD are extremely slow. I'm using a HDD from another computer. It's a decent Western Digital as i found out when I was looking at it, but when i had bought that computer it came with, it never seemed so slow.

What's slowing it down so much? It takes about 5 minutes to start up windows, I've checked the cpu usage and it's only using about 10-20% with 1.56gb of ram free. Of course I've defragged. It seems like when I'm loading windows and things it just sits and doesn't do much.

I bought a sound blaster audigy se and just like the old SB live x-gamer i had years ago, it pops and hisses from time to time. there's a lot of static in this house, but i was just wondering if anyone else had the same problem and if there was some solution

I need to connect my sound card to my case's front audio so i can use the front ports for my headphones. This case has an audio cable to connect to the motherboard's audio connector. But how would I connect my sound card to my case? The cables are different and the card only has the SPDIF connector and another one with a lot of pins.

Would connecting the case's front audio cables to my motherboard give me my sound card's audio anyway? Or is there another way I have to do this? Or do I just have to plug my headphones up directly to my sound card in the back?

I remember my old card and motherboard having an audio cable that connected together, but they must not use that anymore cause I don't see it on either of them now.

If any of that makes sense..

I've switched hard drives to a new mboard before and it worked. It was years ago when I had an HP computer and bought an Epox motherboard. The HD was set up for that HP computer, I had no windows disc - only system restore discs. It's shaky when you first hook up the new HD to everything and I think one time I had to start over and reformat. But what I always did was let it run through and install the hardware it has to (without asking me what to do), then I restart and install the stuff I need discs for. Some stuff I never actually installed properly, if it wasn't broken and it performed right, I didn't fix it.

But now that you mention it I remember that LCD screens don't have refresh rate, I definitely need one cause CRT flicker destroys my eyes.

I think I'm just gonna say the hell with worrying about the HDD/windows, and the monitor. I'll spend the extra and be good to my eyes and get an lcd screen, and the HD and windows OS depend on whether I can get all this started up when the parts ship.

I think I've worn out my welcome asking about this so many times, but thanks to everyone who helped me. I'll let you know how it goes

My Build

I'm trying to avoid buying a new hard drive cause then I'd need a new copy of windows, and it would throw my price up by about $180. So I have a question - Will using an IDE drive instead of a SATA and it being just a generic drive instead of a good 7200 RPM drive hurt my performance with this computer? That's provided I can hook 2 IDE drives up (HDD and DVD) to one cable and one IDE slot on the mboard.

Second, how bad will 1024 X 768 resolution on a 17" screen be with this build? The monitor I may upgrade to if I can save from buying the HDD and Windows is this -

here

But I can't tell what the max refresh rate is at its max resolution, it's going to have to be 85Hz for me so does anyone know what the refresh rate is?

I know I've asked this question a million times in other posts, I'm almost ready to just spend a few more hundred dollars and save myself (and you guys) the trouble of bothering with it