Hardware Tips & Troubleshooting

Sound Card

A world without sound is boring. The same goes to computers. Imagine playing quake with the beeps from the PC speaker. Yucks! The sound card is a piece of hardware to generate high quality sound. It enables your to listen to your CD, record voices with the microphone and playing your sound files.

Don't Throw Away Your Old RAM

If you have and old PC that utilizes old 32 bit RAM, don't throw it away. If you have and AWE (advance wavetable effect) sound card, with empty memory slots, you may plug it into your soundcard to load more instruments. Very useful. If you want, you can go to computer junkyards or dealer with old computers to find some old 32 bit RAM. You can get it for almost nothing.

More, more!

If you are using an AWE soundcard, you might want to get more voices or instruments. Go to your manufacturer's website and search for soundfonts. Like fonts, they are the same instruments but produces different sounds. The amount of soundfonts you can load at a time depends entirely on how much memory you have.

No Sound From Mike

An ageing sound card probably doesn't supply the DC voltage needed to power a new electret microphone-the kind with a mini-stereo (ring-tip-sleeve) plug on the cable. If so, you'll need either an inline battery pack to power the new microphone, or an older dynamic microphone that doesn't need DC power. But the best bet is to throw it away and get a new one. Sound cards are cheap nowadays and you can get a decent one for under $80.

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