Drivers can cause all kinds of woes (X-Fi)

[Kage]

I recently installed Windows 7 x64 onto my machine, on a 1TB drive I had previously thought was going out on me.

I was getting many freezes/blue screens randomly occuring for no reason. I was so fed up last year when I attempted to run these drives thinking one of them had to be faulty (I was running them in RAID), I gave up after the shop said they were both fine, and kept to my XP build.

Last week I tried again. It turned out to be my sound drivers causing all the crashes/freezes I was getting.

I came to think this when one of the freezes occured watching a Youtube video the other day.
The sound screwed up and a few seconds later, the computer went.

I was using an offical release from Creative for X-Fi for Windows 7, released back in 2010.

Turns out sometimes it isn't bad to use BETA releases, and they had one made in 2011. This fixed it completely!

If anyone out there reads this post, and has freezes happening with a sound card like the X-Fi Xtreme Music, install the BETA driver on the Creative site, and the problems will simply vanish

This was the one causing all the issues:
Creative Worldwide Support
SBXF_PCDRV_XPVT_LB_2_18_0015.exe

This is the one that fixed it:
Creative Worldwide Support
SBXF_PCDRVBETA_US_2_18_0015A.exe

[IAntDemo]

good advice this kage, this should be in articles, good helpful advice

[Kage]

Thanks

Should also mention apart from it crashing, the lag was terrible on the official driver.
Playing Stepmania, I had to offset to around -100ms. The new offset, just like the older XP driver, is a more respectable -60ms