Sound problems on my laptop

chuck steak

I recently bought a new laptop and am having some sound issues when playing games; Particularily C&C3. I like to listen to music or podcasts while playing, but when I play C&C3 the audio gets all choppy. The in-game audio also gets choppy sometimes (particularily during the little mission objective videos). It's apparent that it's caused by system lag (or whatever you would call it) because it gets worse if I drag around the map a lot, or have a lot of units on screen. However, the framerate never drops, so it seems to be only an issue with the audio. The same problem happens in Oblivion, but to a much less degree.

So any ideas on what the problem could be or if it's fixable? Could it be because of Vista? I would be willing to install my old copy of XP if it will dramatically improve this problem (though I am enjoying Vista otherwise).

redimpulse

Laptop sound systems are software accelerated. What you're most likely experiencing is software lag because there is very little hardware acceleration available on the sound system. There isn't much you could do except maybe adjust the sound settings (if they're even still available in Vista). Maybe a RAM upgrade.

imbalanced

Or you could try getting an external sound card. Something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102174
Creative External Sound Blaster Live! $52.99

chuck steak

Hmm, that sound card looks very interesting. Is that pretty much guaranteed to fix my issues?

imbalanced

chuck steak wrote: »

Hmm, that sound card looks very interesting. Is that pretty much guaranteed to fix my issues?

I wish I could say yes, but I really don't know. On one hand, it takes the processing strain off your laptop, on the other hand, one of the users comments says he gets stutters in sound on one of his games because of USB bandwidth issues. Just giving you some options.