Could you help me check these?

[dark_guy1000]

I went to the EU Support section on www.creative.com.. to the "Sound - General Troubleshooting" topic in order to sort out the hissing, distortion-like sound that's coming from my speakers. I'm tryign to check all the points mentioned, but don't understand how to on the following:

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If you find any of the above symptoms with your sound card , please go through the following troubleshooting steps:

Physical Installation

*Install your Sound Blaster card in a PCI slot as far away as possible from other components (e.g. graphics card, CPU, hard drives)
*Tidy up all cables inside your PC (to avoid electrical interference)
BIOS related troubleshooting

*Remove all unnecessary hardware to free up resources
*Disable all unused on-board devices (e.g. onboard sound, serial ports)
*System Performance: Try a more moderate setting if your system is set up for maximum performance. (possible settings: "Turbo", "Optimal", "Normal", etc.)
*VGA Shared Memory Size: Try increasing this if you have an onboard graphics card
*AGP Aperture Size (MB): Set this to half the system's RAM or lower
*Peer Concurrency: Toggle this setting
*PCI 2.1 Support: PCI 2.1 must be enabled
*Spread Spectrum Control: Toggle this setting
*PCI Latency Timer: Try different values, starting with 32
*Memory Hole: Toggle this setting
*AGP Fast Writes: Enable this setting if your graphics card supports it
*PNP(Plug and Play) Aware OS: Try setting this to No
*Update the BIOS of your system, if none of the above steps solve the problem
Windows related troubleshooting

*Disable DMA access for your drives: Windows 98SE/ME or Windows 2000/XP


*Contact your motherboard manufacturer/PC vendor to update the chipset drivers


*Lower the hardware acceleration of the graphics card

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Anything in bold I'm not sure how to do and therefore haven't done, could someone explain how to do each one? Sorry for the hassle.

AMD Athlon 1.0 Ghz
GeForce 4 Ti 8x AGP 4200
40 GB
6XX MB RAM

Thanks.

[Cactus]

[dark_guy1000]

Thanks Cactus, I updated my BIOS rather recently though, still hasn't solved the problem I have.. I'll look into the finer details more though, thanks again!

[dark_guy1000]

Hm, still isn't solved..

I looked up info abut IRQ's and the answer might lie in there..

I went to dev manager, right clicked on computer, properties, then at #10 on the list that comes up I have:

*ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering
*ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering
*Sound card

Is it possible that the first two [how come there's two that are exactly the same?] are causing a conflict perhaps? And making the hissing noise?

I've looked for normal conflicts via the dev manager in Media, etc and found no yellow warning signs, so I'm guessing this might be the cause?