Shampoo

I bought my Accoustic Edge at a local Circuit City. Circuit City had a $20 rebate on them when I purchasesd mine; don't know if it's still being offered.

Pirated version of the SBLive? I don't get what you mean. Both my 2 year old SBLive Value and 5 month old SBLive 5.1 XGamer were retail-purchased Creative-boxed cards. I always used the latest version of LiveWare directly from Creative as with the Value, and I used the drivers off the packaged CD with the 5.1 because newer drivers were not available. Right before I abandoned hope and ditched the Live, I tried a few unofficial updated drivers and various VIA patches including the infamous VIA southbridge patch (check out www.viahardware.com). In other words, I was not using a priated, fake card or pirated, hacked software (except at the end). I finally gave up and bought the Accoustic Edge, which alleviated all of my freezeup problems, helped my machine perform better, and is a better-sounding higher-quality card to boot. I have also tried a Santa Cruz in a friends similar machine and have been reasonably impressed with it as well. In other words, I would strongly recommend both the Accoustic Edge or Santa Cruz (the AE more so) to anyone who wants a quality soundcard for their machine. Again, I bet many die-hard SBLive fans would be surprised if they tried one of these cards in their computers for a week.

I've had similar experiences . . . I bought a SBLive Value when they first came out and used it for years with no extreme mishaps under Win98 and Win2K on my old Asus P2B motherboard (other than slow performance with EAX turned on in games). When I upgraded to an Athlon on an Asus A7V133 motherboard, I experienced frequent system locks. Since the system often locked when no sounds were playing, I never suspected the audio card, and proceeded to troubleshoot pretty much every other component in the rig. I also tried buying a new SBLive 5.1 XGamer, but it made no difference. I finally borrowed a Philips Accoustic Edge from a friend and dropped it in. AMAZING! Not only did every lockup and problem I had disappear, but performance shot up and my games run way better than they did with the SBLive, even with EAX on! On top of that, the sound quality was much clearer, and the surround sound with my 4-speaker setup was much better. Needless to say, I gave my SBLive 5.1 to my brother for his rig and bought an Accoustic Edge. This was two months ago and I have never regretted it for an instant. It's also nice to own a sound card from a company that has frequent driver updates (monthly). I have nothing bad to say about the Accoustic Edge and highly recommend it to everyone. I think many people would be surprised to see how much better their systems run with a better soundcard under the hood. The only thing I'm waiting for now is Linux drivers (should be out next month!).

I've been really happy with the Visioneer PaperPort 8600 USB Scanner. Just about everything works fine under Win2K Professional. I paid ~$200 at Staples.