When you purchase a motherboard, one of the things you will realise that most of these motherboard companies will have is some sort of onboard audio chip solution so that there is no need for you to go out and buy an expensive PCI sound card for your own use. Of course, you must understand that this piece of audio equipment soldered onto the motherboard is not only stock, but it has performance limitations. However, it is rock solid as an audio solution and can deliver adequate sound for your entertainment pleasure.

It will not bring the Sydney Opera house into your room, but it is more than enough for someone looking for a normal audio solution to listen to music. In this case, there might be some problems with the Realtek audio solution and this may come in the form of driver issues and conflicts. This of course is not something irregular within the computing world and anyone who has been buying computers regularly will definitely be familiar with the old feeling of something not working because of issues like conflicts and driver issues. There are ways around it and the methods of doing so can be quite far and wide.

But there are some universal tenets where this problem is concerned, and the most common one is that when you have installed some sort of external audio software controller, or you have installed a hardware that uses the same IRQ as Realtek. What you need to do in some cases is make sure that you have switched off the audio chip form the BIOS and then proceed to do your installation.

This can help you to avoid some of these driver problems quite handily and make things work fine again. Another thing is that your drivers are not updated and you need to update them from the website of the motherboard manufacturer, who will give you a whole host of options and methods on how to update your AC'97 audio chip. Also, you might want to check up on the tech forums and search for the possible problems and configurations known to have issues with the chip.

People from all over the world will have put in their 2 cents about this problem and their configurations, as well as posting their solutions to the problem themselves. All you need to do is Google it and you will come to many websites and forums that will point you in the right direction. These are some of the methods and steps you can take to ensure that your audio chip the AC'97 Chip is doing well and there are no further conflicts that could lessen the entertainment value of your computer.

Your problems might not be within the range of these solutions, but it is always good to try all the normal and popular ways first, so that at the end of the day, you do not waste your time by going back to the dealership or lugging your computer to a repair shop for no reason at all when it could have been done from home.