You might have read about my free Audigy 2 card. It has been working fine in Windows 7 after installing unofficial beta drivers for it, even power savings work correctly.

Yesterday something happened, though. First I just lost audio service, making all programs hang up when they tried to do any sounds. Well, simply restart of AudioSrv fixed that (Windows 7 has audio controlling as a service, so one can simply restart the service to reset all things related to sounds) but not everything was like before. The sound balance was off, way off.

Firstly all sounds played with less volume even though the settings and volume were the same, both in software side and on physical speakers. Secondly, the sounds were biased to front speakers while I would prefer the volume to spread equally to front and rear speakers for a nice surround sound. So I thought maybe restarting computer might make it better. It didn't...

So now all volume levels are dropped to half (or even less) with the same settings as before, with rear speakers lost the volume even more. I really don't like the way this is going, even though losing the card is not that big of a financial loss since I paid nothing for it...


On the same day we had some nice Left 4 Dead survival gameplay. As I had to beat Artaxs's time in The Drains, this is what we accomplished:


Shortly after the game we encountered a thunder storm here. It didn't take very long for it to somehow shut down my computer. At that point I deemed it better to unplug all the devices for the night.

Here you can see overdramatized thunder radar picture: http://screencast.com/t/Lma3whhyeQK