Sound problems - will getting an Audigy Notebook card work?

I am one of the many people having the problems with the AC97 onboard sound in my laptop causing a few seconds of lockup when playing Guild Wars. The usual fix of disabling hardware acceleration does solve this, but gives me a whole new set of problems - having sounds repeat at one location (ie I get a repeating e.g. walking sound, but it disappears as I move from the location) and occasionally my entire computer will crash while playing the game.

OK, so far nothing terribly different from the other sound problem threads in this forum. But my super-brilliant plan to fix the problem is to get one of Creative's Audigy 2 ZS Notebook pcmcia cards. Has anyone else tried doing this, and did it work?

I didn't have any issues with the AC97 on my laptop when running GW, but I didn't use it for very long because I've never liked it. Blame it on issues with early versions and a subsequent bias against it .

I have, however, been using an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook card for around a year now and never had any issues. I exclusively use headphones or external speakers with my laptop, though, so I do not know how it performs with built-in speakers.

you can also go to the multimedia settings in windows control panel, under speaker configuration -> advance properties -> performance, you can set quality and hardware acceleration, try puting hardware acceleration to max and lowering conversion quality,
and dont forget to update to latest drivers

Thanks, I tried lowering both Hardware Acceleration and Conversion Quality, both solved the 'freezing every few seconds' situation but after I did that it crashes anyway. However I think the crashing may have actually be caused by overheating (which I will hopefully be fixing in a couple of days when my cooling pad arrives). Updating the drivers didn't help either, but it gets me some new special effects to play with.

If the extra cooling solves the freezing problems I'll stick with my AC97, otherwise I'll get a ZS (assuming my PCMCIA slot is fast enough, which I have asked on Creative's forum about :P). I always use it with earphones anyway so compatibility with the builtin speaker doesn't bother me (I'd imagine it would be screwed, since there is no connection between the card and the speakers).

I'll post on here when I eventually sort this out, just in case anyone in the same boat comes along.

My audigy2 zs notebook card works great. My sound frequently does some wierd stuff, so i bought that a while ago and have had no problems. Also, i am able to play windows media through my laptop speakers and have teamspeak through the pcmcia card. its really great