A good sound card is not necessary if all one does is surf the net and office work. However, for gamers who want the ultimate experience with surround sound, or for audiophiles, who discerning ear prefer a good audio sound, a soundcard can provide them their needs that onboard soundcards do not provide.

• Before you install your soundcard, you need to remove the existing one and all the drivers that is use. If you are using the onboard soundcard, you can disable it in BIOS.

Uninstall all existing drivers in device manager

• Once all traces of the old soundcard are gone, you can proceed to install the new sound card. Seat the soundcard properly, push down and secure the card to the chassis by inserting the back screw.

• That done, startup windows. Follow the windows hardware wizard to install the relevant drivers.

• Use the driver provided by the manufacturer instead the on provided by Windows. The driver provided by Windows may not have all the functions of the soundcard activated.

• Got to start>My Computer and right-click the icon.

• Select properties, hardware tab and then choose device manager. Expand the “Sound, video and game controllers” to see if there are any system conflicts.

Of course, a good sound card means nothing if you don’t have good speakers or headphones. No point in having that surround sound option if all you have are 2 speakers is there?