Free up the load on the CPU in Vista with a sound card upgrade?

[blackranger]

I am trying to free up some of the load on the cpu in Vista. AudioEndpointBuilder is a required service that runs in one of my Svchost processes. It is a hog and I would like to get around it. I know a sound card upgrade in XP can free up the cpu but in Vista I'm reading stuff about how the audio is required to be run through the OS. If anybody has any input I would greatly appreciate it.

On a side note, I have over 12 Svchost.exe processes running on my system at once. I know 6-8 can be normal, but what about 12?

thanks

Edited February 17, 2008 by blackranger

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

Directsound is no longer hardware accelerated as it was on XP so stuff like EAX (in hardware) no longer works but OpenAL is supposed to work and cards cards like ASUS Xonar supposedly do hardware accelerated audio.

but i think it would be much easier to just get a faster CPU than it would be to add in a card to handle your audio.

BTW: 11 svchosts here (Vista Business -ICS, Offline Files, ReadyBoost, R&R Access, Security Center, Tablet Input, Defender, Firewall services disabled)

[blackranger]

Thanks geek for the tip. I am just running a 2Ghz AMD Sempron 3500+ with 894mb Ram. I'm sure I could use hardware upgrades, the money just isn't here now and I'm trying to find some corners to cut in vista. I have killed a few programs from starting up everytime but it seems like Vista just has so many services running at once. I need to find a way to figure out which ones I can live without.

thanks though.