Solution? Do NOT Allow applications to take exclusive control of the dev

Question

Ok, so recently I have been looking at ways of minimising what work my SoundBlaster card has to do under Windows Vista. I have read a lot of people making changes to their bios, changing which slot they keep their cards in and I have had no success with these methods and some I didn?t even try having coming from a incredibly good setup before upgrading to Windows Vista back in November.
So here is my attempt at actually trying to help people.
I have been playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars a lot recently and initially during Beta I found that even the game menu at the start would produce a lot of crackling and then things frankly wouldn?t get any better.
So I had a look in the control panel. Vista does have quite a complicated audio setup, so I did a little work to make it simpler for myself.
http://www.electronicpunk.com/soundblaster/SoundOut.png
I disabled all playback devices I wasn?t using. So ultimately I was just left with speakers. I then opened the speaker properties.
In general, I believe most of the tabs where left as their default, although I did reduce and mute anything I didn?t use such as Line in, Microphone, Digital Out, and Digital in etc. On the last tab I unchecked the box that says ?Allow applications to take exclusi've control of this device this may well be what has made things better, but I thought I would be thorough.
On the sound in, again I kept things to a minimum so much so that nothing on the recording side of my system uses the X-Fi anyway as I have a Logitech camera with integrated sound anyway ? mounted in such a place it made more sense to use it. Again, I denied applications the right to take exclusi've control.
(Perhaps these boxes could be unticked by default in future dri've releases, I see no benefit of having these ticked with so many background processes in Windows)
For those of you that don?t use Logitech webcams, that is as far as we go. But if you do, well we dig deeper.
http://www.electronicpunk.com/soundblaster/SoundIn.png
I have read and sadly I can't cite my sources that some of the advanced audio settings do cause issues with the sounds ? in general
In Windows Vista and I will definitely look into this more on the Logitech forums and with their technical support if possible if I manage to uncover anything, but basically I have taken the steps of cancelling echoes and background noise for the time being ? I will perhaps enable it but I am happy to have crackle free audio. Basically I use headphones so the software thinking it is reducing echoes can't be as there are none so its messy.
Anyway, I hope this helped a few people out and of course I will continue looking into things, I just wanted to post something positi've rather than just having the usual my card doesn?t work rubbish.
Message Edited by ElectronicPunk on 08-07-200704:26 AM

Answer 1

Hi,
I have tried to determine the registry changes when clear/select the option, and the result here seems this action mostly related with the device drivers, couldn't find out any generic registry controlling this device related behavior.
So back to your question, there seems to be no way to change this for large-scale managed.
Best regards
Michael Shao
TechNet Community Support