My thoughts on sound cards in Vista when wanting mic and music.

I've decided to create this rough page as I'm still getting masses of questions on this, and I hope this will answer them.

First see my Video here. You'll note I said at the end.. "if you have to reboot when you enable mix etc you may have problems".

This does seem the case, and there isn't a work round as far as I know. If it was me and it was a desktop PC, I'd be looking here. Despite what you've been told the SB live does work well in Vista with the drivers Daniel Kawakami (google him) created. You'll get mix (What U Hear) and a mic boost, but you'll be limited to 2gigs of ram! You just need a spare PCI slot, and you can find the cards mentioned in that thread on EBay for a for quid. People don't want them as the Vista advisor tells them they don't work.

The drivers Daniel has created are excellent, and the SB live is still prolly the best card to use if you want to talk with music. His drivers also include tone controls. Your options in this price range are limited to say the sound blaster live 24bit (£15 odd) that doesn't have a mic boost and the newer drives DON'T have mix. Above that it's the X-Fi but now we are in the £50 range!

Laptop users with same problem: Your really stuffed I'm afraid. Newer laptops have this new express card slot, and at the mo only Creative make a card that fits it BUT it has no mix feature.

Also see my page here on Dell laptops, and that's in XP, so the chances of those working in Vista are slim.

The other issue in my video was...."If you don't get mix when you show disabled devices etc".

That's just a case of searching the web for different drives if your lucky, and once you have it working be careful the Vista updates don't overwrite them! If it isn't bust etc.. There isn't much truth IMO that this is some sort of conspiracy theory by MS to stop you recording from the web as one of the windows updates actually gave me the mix option when I let Vista find some drivers from Microsoft's site.

Mic boost: I made an error on my video when I showed where the mic boost is should you have one. It's on the Custom Tab of the mic properties on my X-Fi at least (pic below). May vary from card to card though.

I know there are many other makes of sound card out there, but all the above is tried and tested by myself, and the information I gave on creative's and laptops comes from a very reliable source as does that on Dells (that was a new vostro)

Most of you reading this know who I am and how to contact me, and feel free to do so! I am open to any suggestions / info etc, but please try and provide proof of what you've done rather than "I heard somewhere".