Sound Problems during loading

[69king]

Ok, this happens in other games too but I was wondering of anyone could help me.

When the game is in the loading screen the sound will become very choppy and stuttery. The for a few minutes after the game has loaded the sound will still be weird.

I was using an onboard sound card but now I have upgraded to a SoundBlaster Live 24-bit. The problem is a little better now but still very annoying. I think it must have something to do with another part of my system. I have a P4 2.4GHz with 512 Mb RAM and an ATI 9600xt.

 

[69king]

I think I have fixed it myself. I did 2 things:

1. I disabled the Realtek AC'97 onboard audio in the device manager. I tried uninstalling it but it would then automatically reinstall it and I couldn't stop it.

2. I switched my page file from my c: drive to my secondary HD.

The game loaded with only 2 or 3 tiny skips in the sound and was working perfectly when it had finished loading. It also loaded about 3X faster (due to switching the page file I guess )

 

[meowsqueak]

There's an incompatibility between the PCI bus and the ATAPI interface on some cheaper motherboards that starves the PCI bus when the disk is accessed. This can cause soundcards to stutter while the disk is being read/written to. There's a similar problem involving video cards too. I'm not really sure if there's a software fix, but I had this problem so on my last upgrade I resolved to spend a little extra and bought equipment that fortunately doesn't seem to suffer any sort of hardware problem. I haven't seen my PC lock up or crash in months.