Tweak Central

information

Main Menu

Home

Performance Tweaks

Enabling DMA

Customizing Tweaks

General Tweaks

Win 98/95 tweaks

Win 2k/NT tweaks

Browser/mail tweaks

Links

tweak sites

hardware/
performance links

software/OS links

news/misc links

Files

Articles and Specials

get rid of ads

emergency boot disk

cookies info page

keyboard shortcuts

paranoid ie5 page

Archived News




Other stuff

About Tweak Central
contact info
general info
legal info
privacy info
what's on my desktop


Contact Tweak Central




Best tweak sites

ActiveWin
ACXEL216's MAX SPEED
Tweak3D.net

See more excellent Tweak-related sites in links

Tweak Central is hosted by Pair Networks

If you own Outlook Express 5 and you'd like to use some of the tips we used on OE 4, you have to modify them a bit.

Creative Labs has the nasty habit of making their "driver" downloads kinda big. I'm no math major, but Judas Priest! To Creative's credit, they realized that not everyone has a "fat-pipe" like me and have made a driver only download that doesn't give you the "features" of Live!Ware and just gives you functionaliy of your sound card. Yeah, it's only 4 Megs or so. The Live!Ware includes a bunch of applications that let you play with your sound card (I think). I've never used the stuff on there. Just so you know...


And I apologize for the tone of this article, I think I was having a "bad day" when I wrote it. I'll try to get around to rewriting soon, but you know me... Enjoy!



If you own a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! sound card (and maybe some others), there is a utility called AudioHQ that resides in your tray that allows you to quickly access some features of the sound card. My beef is that there's half-a-dozen things on there that I would never use. I've looked at them and most of them don't even work. Why don't we see if we can't "tweak" this baby a little and get it to be a little more how we want it. We decide, right?

Turn: into this:

Look at all the garbage Creative Labs _MAKES_ you have. I know, it "enhances your experience"™, but in the future, could we just make it so users can choose what they want to install, like a volume control, and not have a bunch of other stuff forced on them? What do you say?

Well, we all know that's not going to happen. So in the meantime, let's take a little control of your PC and lighten up that Audio HQ menu.

This one's a piece of cake. Let's hope the folks at Creative don't catch wind of this and make it impossible to have what we want on the menu.

When you install the Creative Live! drivers, the setup will ask you if you want even more crap installed on your machine, as always, Tweak Central favors a minimalist approach, deselect everything you don't want/need (ie everything except drivers) and install.

Then you're faced with the "Register Now" screen and some veiled threats and or lies about the warranty and of course the information that's missing is how the information in this SURVEY (admit it, that's all it is) will be used.

Tweak Central policy is to NEVER, EVER "Register" software. When software companies decide to start telling the truth, then we'll talk. OK.

Go to the following locale: (if your install is different, just find the Ahq directory on your machine).

Create a directory ( File | New | Folder or Righ-click | New | Folder and give it an appropriate name ) in which to place the files we won't be using. A Real-Man™ would just delete the files, but I like to hang on to them in-case I need them later.

Select all the files you won't need and move them to the 'crap' directory. For example, to keep only the mixer, you'll want to keep the files in figure 1. (I'm not sure if you need all of these, feel free to experiment on your own).

fig 1

Try clicking the Audio HQ icon in your tray and see the results of your work (you may need to reset). If you get an error message, see what file it's asking for and put that in the Ahq directory.


That should be it. See, I said it was simple.


Good Luck!


I'd love to hear what you think, email me .
I'd especially like to hear from you if you're off-your-rocker and disagree with me or think you're Jesus or something... ha.

Creative Labs
I'll give you a dollar if you can find the drivers (begin the download) within a minute of visiting the site

SoundBlaster.com
huh? I don't know why it gets its own site...

Creaf.com
huh?!? I have no idea what a "creaf" is, but apparently there are drivers here?

Back to Top

Back (Previous)