Update your driver for the sound card with a Sound Blaster driver, not the installed AC97 driver.
Just bought this machine a month ago. There are some very nice features, but there are some quirky things as well.
1. Internet Explorer has crashed 3 or 4 times with multiple windows open (of course this happened at work as well. Who knows what THAT is).
2. Creative SB Live! Diagnostic says that the hardware failed. The diagnostic is not seeing the sound card I added! (It works however and is listed in Device Manager).
3. Testing the sound card speakers sometimes causes a loud mechanical Phhhbbbttting and other times produces a normal, accurate test.
4. The system crashed & rebooted last night as the result of one of the IE windows "Needing to close."
5. I've added 2 1GB sticks of 3200 DDR (Rosewill), ABit 256 MHz PCI-xpress graphics card and Creative SB Live! digital 5.1 sound card. I've disabled the integrated graphics card, but left the AC97 integrated sound alone. Only change there was that Creative SB Live! card took over as default sound device.
Any suggestions?

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