Review on 🎧 Vantec UGT-S220 7.1 Channel PCIe Sound Card by Anthony Tegan

I bought a Vantec 7.1 channel PCI sound card to fix faulty onboard sound hardware in a 10 year old Dell Replace Dimension 8300 with Windows 7 (32-bit) Home Premium. Although the Vantec card is clearly overkill for an old 2 channel speaker box, I was pleased to find a very cheap PCI slot product in this card that clearly claims the support of Windows 7 websites . sites. In the end, while I'm fairly happy with the UGT-S100, my own ignorance of the one step that seemed required to properly reconfigure my old system resulted in tedious hours of troubleshooting before the audio would play. If you're interested, see the details below - either because you like to laugh at the frustration of a user who didn't know enough initially, or because you may find my experience useful as you are or may be in a similar situation , that is, the installation of the card and driver looks perfect, but there is no sound. After the initial installation of the UGT-S100 card and driver, Windows Device Manager reassured me that the card was "working properly" and that the appropriate signed driver was installed. Why didn't I have any sound then? I turned to troubleshooting more or less systematically (e.g. I disabled the onboard sound chip, but now also removed the driver; connected a different set of speakers to the card; removed the Vantec card, uninstalled the driver, the computer restarted) . , turned off, reinstalled the card (to another PCI slot) and drivers, etc. etc. etc.). Still no sound from the speakers. Finally, after several reboots and over an hour of fiddling, I went into the Windows Device Manager to check the speaker/sound card assignments and from what I've seen I'll probably have to manually select/assign speakers as default devices in order to Play audio from a newly installed Vantec card. Aha! Finally sound! Maybe I'm the only one (or a very small minority) who had this setup issue or didn't realize I needed to make this (obvious?) change. However, neither the Vantec installation guide nor the card's instruction manual mentions that in some cases this manual reassignment of devices may be required. As far as I know, this is not the kind of knowledge that all humans are born with. And to be honest, none of the 20+ online commenters whose product reviews I read flagged this as an installation issue. This could mean that (1) most users know that this manual setup needs to be done (obviously!), (2) the problem is rare and maybe only on a few surviving legacy systems/motherboards like mine, or (3) Most users/customers encountering this issue do not fix it but return the card for a refund or a replacement stamp, or maybe just throw it away. Such people may (understandably) not want to spend any more time writing a review. BTW, although there is a driver on the included product CD and Windows seems to install the (generic?) driver when it detects a new card installed. and the disk is not available. In addition, there is an easy-to-use driver installer in a zipped file that includes a small but informative user manual that can be downloaded from the Vantec website. The driver from the Vantec website also installs the console for the card. identified by an icon in the Windows notification area. Users who can use the full functionality of the map may find the console handy. With my inexpensive 2-channel system, I'm just happy to be able to hear proper stereo sound again. So, one day, when I'm no longer bothered by the mysterious installation error, and having listened to a wide range of audio, I'm pretty happy with the Vantec UGT-S100.