Sound problem? Ethernet card problem???

Background: My brother and I use a program called Picophone as a telephone while he is going to school in alaska. His microphone makes a constant buzzing, staticky noise, which is rather annoying -- I keep telling him to get a new one --lol. Whenever he plays counter-strike MY sound quality suddenly gets horrible. When he starts a program that loads his cpu heavily the strange noise gets quieter. When he starts a program that uses the ehternet card (specifically HLSW, a utility to keep tabs on CS servers (like gamespy)) the noise gets louder. If he plays UT2003, however, the "symptoms" are not repeated. My question is: WHAT could be causing this problem and is it fixable? I thought at first that it was his microphone causing it, but now I believe it's something else. Feel free to ask questions, as I do have more to tell if it's needed.

Are the sound and ethernet cards in adjacent PCI slots? Could be cross-talk / EM-interference. Try moving them to slots that are farther apart.

Also, are the drivers up-to-date? Sometimes, driver issues can generate strange problems such as these. Also, if the mobo has any chipset drivers, those should be updated as well.

-- Paul

Macklin has a helpful tip, but based on your other input you may also want to check the multimedia settings and disable the microphone boost. Microphone boost is ONLY meant for recording sound in an insulated room that doesn't repeated ambient noise (it uses CPU cycles when you're using them microphone so if your CPU gets hogged by another program it will probably go away).

Ah, yes, I forgot about that! Good point! -- Paul

I forgot to mention that the sound is onboard. Anyways, he moved the ethernet card to a different pci slot because it was sharing an irq with the sound hardware. He installed the VIA 4in1 drivers just now (btw, there's some new ones out, Sept. 13, 2002). They didn't help ):
The microphone boost... He has to have that on so that I can hear him at all. Maybe it could just be the quality of his microphone?

Interesting issues .. Thanks for reporting back!

Is he overclocking? It might be that his onboard sound doesn't deal with it all that well. If he does overclock, a good test woudl be to back down to stock speeds and try again. Ya' never know!

The microphone could be it (if nothing else, a better mic might let you disable the boost.)

Good luck! -- Paul

Already tested to see if overclocking made a difference. I think a new microphone is going to fix his problem though. I'm making him order one right now

Good luck! It sounds like you've tried a lot of good things. Hope it works out for you! -- Paul