Repairing and Upgrading Your PC

Installing a Sound Card

An audio adapter physically installs just as any other expansion card does. Some audio adapters require many system resources, so keep the following guidelines in mind:

If you are rebuilding your system

Install the audio adapter before you install other components such as network adapters, allowing the audio adapter to make first claim on system resources. Although Windows and recent motherboards usually do a good job of juggling resources, we have experienced resource conflicts when installing an audio adapter in a system that was already heavily loaded with other adapters. If that happens, the best course is to disable all adapters in Device Manager (except essential ones like the video card and disk interfaces), then physically ...