(Possible) Audio driver worries

Hello everyone,

So I recently upgraded my PC after having a 939 DIL Socket processor for years. I've been spending the past few days trying to get it back up to scratch but I have a problem.

Each time I run a game (MW2/Total Annihilation/Half Life 1 etc) the game appears and lets me play which is all well and good. The problem happens at a random amount of time after I have started playing. For no reason (that I know of) the game still plays but the audio completley messes up. Without any cue, a random sound bite that's usually a couple of seconds long will loop forever. The game I'm usually on tens to be able to carry on playing with this error, but if I try to quit the game or change audio settings, it crashes instantly and I have to reboot. The reset button has gotton more use than my left click.

I'm inclined to think that I have a faulty audio driver but I have little idea about how to fix it.

My motherboard has the option of running the AC97 audio panel or a HD audio panel. My hard drives that I carried over used to work fine using the AC97 one but the only driver that was supplied with the motherboard was for the HD audio driver. I could also have wired the front panel audio cables wrong but according to the manuals instructions, I've done it right (according to the AC97 panel instructions at least).

Have any of you had similar problems? I'd love to get it fixed and thanks in advance for any help.

My specs are:

Motherboard: K10N78D
Processor: AM2 2.4ghz
RAM: Corsair DDR2 2GB
Video: Geforce 9500 GT @ 1GB

Before I go, I did move a lot of hardware from my old PC to this new one. My theory is that there may be one or two drivers conflicting with the new drivers I put in. I could easily be wrong, but hey, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

 

My version of Windows is XP Professional and it has Service Pack 3. At the minute I don't have an internet connection at home so I'm using a relatives until the engineers come over and install it (so it could take me a while to respond here...sorry).

Under the device manager, the only icon that's marked as yellow is for the ethernet adapter (which isn't neccessary for the moment (I hope)).
Prior to installing the current audio driver, the sound driver was also marked as yellow but since installing this one, it disappeared.

I've used 'msconfig' to turn off a load of unnecessary services like the adobe updater and several others that weren't important. When I run the task manager, the performance always stays low (Both CPUs usage @ 0-5%) and my pagefiles stay low as well. I did set my page file size to a huge amount a while ago. At the moment, I think it commits about 5gb. I've never had any trouble with that before but do you think I ought to lower it?

If possible, I'd dearly like to avoid doing a clean windows install because I don't have the disk for it nor can afford a new one (Windows 7) at the moment. Plus there's a lot of data on both hard disks that I'd like to keep.

The audio driver I have under my device manager is "VIA HD Audio"

If you need any other info, let me know and I'll get back to these posts as soon as I can.

Thanks.

 

Hi again.

Thanks for all the advice. I've attached an everest report as plain text. Unfortunatley, I forgot the instruction to get "system info" only. So ALL of my computer information is in it. I've also changed the msconfig to allow all normal programs to run as well as change my pagefile size to be managed by the OS. Also, I've not yet managed to put in the ethernet driver but will do as soon as I get the chance.

Unfortunatley, I have no idea what my old motherboard was. I threw it out once I installed the new one. As far as I remember, it had a 939DIL processor socket and that's about it.

Hope the info helps.

Thanks again.