Hi,

I'm certainly not a pro but hoping the pros could please give me some advice.

My old computer has an aureal vortex 8830 card, and the maker is out of business as everyone knows. There's no support. Through various crashes and reformats over the years, the audio has stopped working and it's impossible to find drivers now.

The obvious answer is get a new card (and/or computer...it's time, but I don't have the $ right now). Until I get some $ to get a new card or computer, does anyone know of a legit place that has a driver for this card that's XP compatible? This old computer is not worth investing in, so if there's a bandaid for now, that would be excellent.

The computer is a AMD 500mHz Athlon with XP Pro.
Under System Information it says I have the driver wdm_au8830 which is running fine and in doing hardware checks on the card in the audio section of the computer Control Panel, it says the device is working properly. It's definitely not working properly.

I've tried every plugin possible for speakers. Audio settings. Searched forums. I'm lost. I've searched online for drivers but all the sites that supposedly have it seem pretty sketchy and I don't want a virus.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get this working? Thanks!

Jessica

Does this machine use a VIA chipset? If so you aren't going to have much luck....

Aureal never had a chance to finalize their drivers for the Windows NT platform (of which Windows 2k and XP are) They released some alpha quality drivers for Windows 2000 right before they went under. These drivers have some massive problems on certain VIA and SiS chipsets. Namely the ones used on Socket 7 boards and early generation Slot A/SocketA machines. I don't think the cards function at all on most modern chipsets.

Getting audio functioning on these chipsets require changes to the PCI configuration register on every bootup using some utilities called wpcr_edit & wpcr_set.

And even then you have to try a few different values to see which one gets you audio in the first place, and then which one gives you audio that doesn't crackle I know from experience!


Honestly, its better to just buy a cheap $5-10 AC97 based soundcard off one of the many computer sites on the net.... Despite being AC97, it would have better performance than the Aureal card ever will on a 2k/XP system.

There are actually some hacks out there that enable playback on the vortex2 + Via platform. I had two machines using them on KT133 boards, and one on the KX133 years ago. Google for it, I don't remember the details, but you had to edit some settings or something to keep the sound from dropping out after a few seconds.

Edit: Teach me not to read carefully. stevewm covered it. Though I had good luck with the hack. It worked well enough that I kept the boards until they were replaced by the onboard on later nforce systems. Good luck.

i have the win2k and win9x driver for the aureal 8830

i keep alot of drivers on a cd in case i need to install them for a customer.

i bleeive that ther was i pci latancy patch for the kt 133 problems.
solved alot og SB live issues.

i got that also.