After being tipped off to an awesome deal on a Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card, I had quite the interesting experience actually installing the thing in my computer. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the drivers and helper applications to install completely; it would get about 75% of the way through and either freeze completely or cause one of those magical BSODs that, until now, I had never experienced on this computer.

As it turns out (and they recommend in the documentation), a BIOS update fixed the issue completely. I installed a beta version of the BIOS since that was the newest version available, created sometime in 2005. Updating the BIOS is always something of a trying time, because one gets quite anxious fiddling with the very brains of the machine. Luckily there were no problems updating and things are just as stable as they were before, only now I have an awesome sound card as well.