Introduction

[psic88]

Hi there.
Obviously, I'm new on here but sort of middling in terms of experience,
same as most of us I guess!
I joined up to answer a Q on here re email notifiers for ie7, but there are loads of
things that I don't know and know I want to, er.... you know what I mean anyway.

Here's a Q then. Your starter for ten.
Why can't I run two sound cards (SB128pci and RealtekHD onboard) on one PC?

And an A (which doesn't necessarily belong on this bit so I'll post it where it should be
as well, and may be wrong anyway!).
I have a Wisdom-soft add-on in ie7 which arrived along with screenhunter 5.1 free and
plays a sound of my choice if email arrives in any of my email a/c's which it checks as
frequently as I wish.

Another Q for a bonus - what would be good tags for this post?

Psic88

 

[kmote]

Hi psic88, welcome to the forum. You should post your question in their relevant area - that way the people who know the most about your problem can see it. Also it's great that you want to answer somebody else's question but you should not post in a thread that old.

 

[KSoD]

Hello Psic88,

To answer your question.

It is possible to run 2 Sound cards on a PC. The limitation is that you will have to choose the output device in the Control Panel tot he sound device you wish to use at that time.

It could also be that the sound drivers are conflicting which is what is stopping you as well. But many people here run dual sound cards with little to no issues other than having to switch the sound output to the device of their choice. Windows will not know which device you have speakers hooked up to at that time and it can not output through both of them at the same time.

With that being said:

 

[Hefemeister]

Welcome to the forums

 

[Trotter]

 

[psic88]

Hi everybody. Belated thanks for your welcome and help with the thorny double
soundcard problem. On the soundcard properties it has a tickbox for
'use only default devices' so I hoped if that wasn't ticked it would use both or all.

Why can't you use more than one?

psic88

ps Originally I didn't set up notification properly, so I didn't realise there was any response to this thread. Sorry.

 

[KSoD]

windows wont allow you to use more than 1 because of IRQ. If you had 2 sound cards operating at the same time they would conflict with each other with the IRQ Requests to the CPU and it would cause the system to go into a loop and not process any requests that were sent after those were sent at the same time.

It would either cause a system freeze or you would not get any sound period cause those requests would be dropped due to conflict.

There is only a limited range of IRQ's that can be used. Therefor Windows only allows for 1 sound card to be operational and the default device at any given time.

I hope that makes some sense out of this.

 

[ARMOROS]

Welcome mate....

 

[Luke]

welcome to the forum,