DKI

Odd With the soundblaster audigy 2zs or XFI i never had any issues like you said, maybe just luck. The only time i have poor sound output is if the sound was done poorly on a dvd (which is very very few dvd), but the vast majority of dvds i got have had good clear sound from all speakers and the centre speaker has always outputted clearly.

As clavicle said Music is encoded in 2 channel so it would only play through two channels. Creative have a feature called CMSS-3D that basicly upmixes 2 channel audio on the fly and plays it through all the speakers. For dvd movies you need to find out if your version of powerdvd 6 will allow you to set more then 2 speakers for surround sound playback as others have said. There are different versions (e.g. OEM, Retail Standard and Deluxe Editions) and according to the website powerdvd 6 deluxe edition would allow 7.1 speaker setup and standard 5.1 and OEM is down to the manufcture who offers it but usually i never seen any offer more then 2 channels. Me I have powerdvd 7 set to SPDIF out in the speaker settings and in the creative xfi audio console i have my speakers set to 7.1 (T7900) and the creative decoder tab settings to use built in decoder for Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES decoding (applys to audigy 2 value and above) so the card drivers can do the decoding.

DEP is built into windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP X64. Mostly on older processors like the Atholon XP or Pentium 4 processors there was no EVP or EDB instructions built into the processors for DEP to use so DEP would be software inforced which is not as effective so it won't have those issues and less likely to see those popups. DEP works with those instructions on the processors that have them instructions so it is more effective to help keep the OS slightly safer but also can cause some issues. I only had a few older game that had an issue with DEP. Microsoft have given four switches (to be applyed in the boot.ini file) so it can be ajusted to different levels from always on to always off.

I have had two processors that have hardware support that DEP uses AMD64 3200 (sk754) with Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP) (no execute (NX) i belive it was called first) Intel Pentium D 915 (2.8Ghz) with Execute Disable Bit (enabled in bios) I always have DEP on and i only a few old games that would not run with it on but with everything else like vmware installer and office 2003 it worked fine. The AMD EVP was always on and no options to disable it in the BIOS (I think it varies depending on motherboard manufucture). The only way to disable DEP is to use the /noexecute=alwaysoff in the boot.ini file and then reboot for it to take effect. Personally i use optout and then in the DEP panel add the file to a list for DEP to ingore and if that fails use the always off as a last resort. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...p/depcnfxp.mspx