Control Panel Settings

The control panel has some extra settings that you can use to set the speakers and tweak performance options. I have taken these screenshots from Windows 2000. Windows 9x and Me should have similar screens.

First, go to control panel and open up Sounds and Multimedia Properties. Select the Audio tab. You'll see this:

Click on the Advanced button in the Sound Playback frame. This dialog box will pop up:

Here you can use the Speaker Setup drop down box to choose the speaker configuration. This is good if you have the WDM drivers installed, but somehow do not have the driver CDs to install Surround Mixer.

The next tab is Performance.

Here you can decrease Hardware acceleration slider to solve certain motherboard noise issues. Click here to see our page on this issue. You should leave it at Full for the least CPU utilization when the sound card is used.

I believe the Sample rate conversion quality slider doesn't do anything here, because for the SBLive! it is handled in hardware. Please let me know if I am wrong.

The Advanced button in the Sound Recording frame also has similar performance settings, but applies to tasks which does wave file recording, including telephony software which samples your voice from the microphone input.