One day my friend Tom asked me for help to repair his computer. Then I checked the machine for him.

Tom has a computer with an ASUS P4P800 SE motherboard, integrated ADI AD1985 AC97 audio control chips, and the SoundMax controller that powers his audio device. This setup is very handy and enough for him, but there’s a fly in the ointment: the audio driver you installed from the disk that came with the main board has some glitches: whenever a certain “big scene” comes up, for example: an explosion scene in a DVD movie or when the crowd screams in the Real Football 2009 game, there are always some clicks from the sound card.

Before Tom turns to me, he tried to fix the problem himself. First, he thought about updating the audio drivers, and then he browsed websites to download audio drivers, got the updated SoundMax driver for Windows 2000/XP, downloaded and zipped it immediately, double-clicked to install the files, without However, after a while, the system indicates that no hardware was found and the files cannot be installed. Then according to the specific path in Device Manager Tom updated this driver again but it still failed. He finally had no choice but to download the old driver and reinstall it, the result was the same.

When faced with a problem like Tom’s, I recommend breaking it down into several parts as follows:

First, open the audio device’s Properties in Device Manager to see its details: (for example, in Windows XP) click Start and select Control Panel, click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System, choose Hardware and click on Device Manager, next double click on Sound, video and game controllers, then the audio device will be listed below, right click on the audio device and choose Properties and select details.

Write down the ID number, for example, my audio device ID is “pciven_8086&dev_24D5&subsys_80F31043”. Open the “SMAXWDA” folder in the driver programs we just downloaded, select the “W2K_XP” folder and open the “SMWDMVI3.inf” file in notepad, find out the “[AnalogDevices]” element, under this element in the same format, write the identification number that we just noted.

Lastly, save this file and set up a suitable audio driver. Therefore, the above error would not occur again.

After installing the new jumpsuit, we can finally say goodbye to pops and never suffer from twitters in Real Football. Users with the same motherboard and unable to update SoundMax drivers would also take this approach.

How to solve the SoundMax driver update failure problem

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