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Answer» So I finally got rid of the last daily used Pentium 4 computer in my home. I did some work for a client migrating his data from a Dell Inspiron 530 with Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2Ghz with 2GB RAM running XP to a brand new Core i7 system with Windows 7 64-bit.
After the data was migrated to the new system, all he wanted was his original hard drive from this system and the rest of the computer could be DISPOSED of.
This made for a sweet upgrade for my daughter who had been running a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz HT for about 3 years now that was showing its age when she was playing web based games etc with its Geforce 6200 video card in AGP 8x slot.
I was hoping to move her hard drive from her Pentium 4 to this newer Core 2 Duo Dell, but I only saw SATA ports and a floppy port on the motherboard with no IDE ports. So I had a Qosmio laptop that I gutted 2 hard drives out of that were SATA and one of them went to my system, and the other I used to install XP Pro SP3 clean to her new Core 2 Duo system.
This Core 2 Duo Dell also had either a PCIE 16x 1.0 or 2.0 slot and so I placed a GeForce GT 430 video card in that slot so that it wouldnt struggle with integrated video.
Then when the system was all BUILT up and running I realized that she didnt have sound yet all drivers were installed. I raised the volume to the max and could barely hear the sound. Looked over at the 15 year old HP Speakers that use to connect to the sides of a big CRT and sure enough they were so old that they did not have a amplifier for the speakers.
So I was faced with either buying her a new set of amplified speakers for like $30-$50 or take the Creative Labs CT5801 Sound Blaster out of the old Pentium 4 and place that into this Core 2 Duo and hopefully there are still drivers out there for this 15 year old sound card with XP support.
Swapped this sound card which came from an old HP Pavilion Celeron 500Mhz originally from the late 90s and placed it from the Pentium 4 that was running it prior into this newer Core 2 Duo system and sure enough there are still drivers out there for this card. Driver installed and configuring Windows to make the integrated sound secondary with this Sound Blaster 128 as the primary, and tested the sound and it made me jump because I forgot to lower the volume.... After jumping out of seat when the Sound Blaster literally "Sound Blasted me " from youtube music video, I lowered the volume and was good to go.
I really never thought that I'd still be using this old Sound Blaster years later when I yanked it out of the Celeron 500Mhz many years ago. But this Sound Blaster is the older type of sound card with an amplifier built in to drive speakers, when just about all of them today require the set of speakers or audio system itself to amplify a weaker signal from the PC Audio Jack or assume that a low draw headset is plugged in which isnt driving a 10 watt speaker set etc.
So the Sound Blaster 128 lives on until PCI slots become obsolete or the sound card or speakers fail. I have my bet on the fact that the card and speakers will probably RUN FLAWLESS until the end of PCI supported motherboards...LOL
Also was nice to pull off this upgrade for my daughter and not have to spend any money in the process. She is loving gaming on it with no lag. Minecraft use to be jumpy with frame rate with the GeForce 6200 video card and its extremely smooth with the GeForce 430GT. World of Warcraft also runs very well with the normal graphics settings with 40 to 60 fps, whereas before with the Pentium 4 2.8Ghz and GeForce 6200 at lowest graphics settings she was getting 15-25 fps and so it was laggy. Lag is all gone now
Here is the Sound Card that lives on that has built in amplifier to drive speakers directly and WORKS with XP : http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/bph06255.pdf
In the many years dealing with Creative Labs products I have only seen 1 sound card die and I have a strong belief that it was caused by a stupid user that hooked the output of the sound card up to the output of an amplifier and not the input blowing the sound card that way vs the card just getting up and quitting on use. The person who had me check out this problem years ago was known to make poor decisions such as try to turn a CD ROM for a PC into a CD Player for their car and smoked that when they applied 12VDC to the 5VDC pin of the P connector. Had it been an older CD Rom with the play button and they used a 5 volt regulator to feed the 5VDC off a 12VDC source, they might have been successful. More info on that here: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fef31ab6-d2bf-4b30-a0d6-28331b850ac2/transform-a-cdrom-drive-into-a-car-cd-player?forum=studentrockstar
Congrats...and i bet she's thrilled...
On your note above i only had 1 Blaster card ever go South on me as well thru all those early years.
I remember having to write bat files for each game so the game would load proper drivers for the card...fun stuff
Quote I remember having to write bat files for each game so the game would load proper drivers for the card...fun stuff
Surprised you needed to change it up between games like that. I ended up finding a good configuration to get maximum base memory of around 608k free and everything else loaded into high memory. At one point the system ( 80486 DX4 100Mhz with 8MB RAM) was running with only 590k free and this caused some problems with games that wouldnt run. But once I got the configuration worked out and 608k base memory free with 32k of base memory in use for other features everything was good. There were some games that had to be configured before playing them, but they maintained this info in a data file associated with the EXE file.
I think the only time I ran into an issue with my Sound Blaster 16 ISA Card and the config was when I added a 10 megabit 3Com ISA Network Adapter and the IRQ of my Sound Card was conflicting with the NIC at IRQ 10. This was resolved by moving Sound Card to IRQ 11. And the reason why the sound card as not at IRQ 5 is because my 14.4k modem was set to IRQ 5 because I was using COM 1 for Mouse at IRQ 4, and COM 2 for Scientific Calculator tether ( serial link ) at IRQ 3, Trident 2MB Video Card was using IRQ 9, and so I was using all the IRQ's I had available. * I then had to reconfigure these games for IRQ 11 vs 10 for sound.
Had I not been in college at the time requiring the Scientific Calculator Serial Tether to COM 2, I could have had my 14.4k modem at COM 2 and IRQ 3, and had my sound card at IRQ 5 which was suggested in the Sound Blaster 16 manual for jumper position, but the 14.4k modem which was also not Plug n Play could not be jumpered any higher than IRQ 5.
It all worked, but with no more free IRQ's there was no adding anything else to that 486 computer. I suppose I could have placed the internal modem onto COM 2 or COM 4 for IRQ 3 to share the IRQ 3 with the serial tether, but it would be one device at a time and not both and there were times when I would be working through AOL 2.5 dial-up over 14.4k and need to check my college black board system which was more like a HTML bulletin board and work at the same time printing out plotted graphs with my wide Epson LQ 1050+ Dot Matrix Printer with tractor feed paper etc.
Carmaggedon was about the maximum game that system could run back then, and this game had its own setup feature to detect or manually configure the sound card to run with the game. I had to upgrade to a Pentium and more memory to play Quake etc. The 486DX4 100Mhz was a good CPU 20 years ago, but the Pentium's had it beat in performance. I got the 486DX4 100Mhz with a motherboard and 8MB RAM for just $40 off of a friend who upgraded and it was far better than the 386SX 40Mhz I was running prior which was given to me from another person who also upgraded and was looking to give the working motherboard a good home vs tossing it away. And that beat the pants off of the 286 12Mhz I was running prior that I bought in 1993 for $120 used with 40MB Hard Drive..LOL
Just curious as to what games were picky requiring special batch files for them?
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