Creative Labs PCMCIA Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook ( 70SB053000012 )

This sound card is alright. I would recommend NOT buying this soundcard if your laptop is not high end, or is slow, low ram, or constantly using up a lot of CPU speed. I have the Gateway Tablet PC, and at first I had a lot of problems with this card, but after about 2 hours of configuring it, and my computer, it now runs with no problems in high end games. I also have a lot of experience with computers though. If you are going to be playing high end games then I would recommend getting this, if you are only going to be playing music, find an alternative.

This audio card was bought for only one purpose - to record "What U Hear" for a Vista PC. It doesn't work in that capacity and no properly working software appears to be forthcoming from Creative Labs. The card has proven worthless to me.

not the greatest, it works until you try to safely remove it from windows. then it blue screens. also installs a bunch of stuff at startup.

I bought this card as an upgrade to the built-in sound on an old Gateway laptop running Vista 32-bit. The sound is incredible with stunning clarity - like moving from standard to high-def. Downloaded and installed latest driver from Creative's website and after one reboot the new sound card was up and running. The first thing I noticed with this card was that the noise floor fell to the ground - quiets are dead quiet with no artifacts or distortion whatsoever - amazing!The card defaults to 16-bit @ 44 kHz (which has softer line-levels) so be sure to go in to the sound settings and select 24-bit with at least 44 kHz sampling rate then line-levels will be big and bold. The record "what you hear" feature is a big bonus too - works like a charm. I avoided all the software that comes with the card since I already have preferred apps for recording and playback - works seamlessly with those too.I'm very happy with this purchase!

This is my Setup. Dell 9300 alright laptop. Smooth installation of 20 minutes + a Reboot. Sound quality is really good. Didnt hug my resources. Totally worth it.Recommend 100%

I bought the Sound Blaster PCMCIA card rather than cheaper models because I figured I would get a better sound quality and less problems than a simple USB plug in model and I needed it for my laptop, which has limited USB ports. I wasn't even looking for quality equivalent to my sound card. I simply needed sound from my Gateway laptop because the sound card was no longer working and I would have to replace the entire motherboard to fix it.Unfortunately, I have been extremely disappointed with this product. First, I had to run it in "standard" rather than "advanced" mode to get it to work. Perhaps with more fiddling I could have gotten it to work in "advanced" mode, but for $100 I expect a plug-and-play. Secondly, even in "standard" mode, I sometimes get all kinds of pops, static and distortion (I tried multiple headphones and speakers, so its the card, not the speakers). There appears to be no rhyme or reason for when it decides to work and when it does not.The biggest problem I've found is that if I bump the card, which is easy to do since it sticks out about an inch from the laptop, it sometimes causes the computer to crash (the computer is a 2004 Gateway 450RG laptop, running Windows XP Professional). Not just hang up, but a blue screen appears that tells you a fatal error has occurred and the computer promptly restarts so that you lose whatever you were working on in addition to the annoyance of having to restart. It would be one thing to have the Creative Labs software hang-up or crash, but there is no acceptable reason for a $100 hardware card to cause the computer to crash and restart.I give it one star only because it does produce decent sound most of the time (in "standard" mode) - but what causes it to work poorly the rest of the time remains a mystery.

I purchased this product because I discovered through the use of an oscilloscope that at sufficiently high volumes, the Pulse Code Modulation in my laptop clips the audio signal of the headphone output above a certain amplitude, producing unacceptable distortion.The Audigy 2 ZS Notebook offers a decent undistorted volume, but I give it three stars because (1) the Wave Table Synthesis offered with the product (Creative SoundFont Synthesizer) seems to be slightly inferior to the generic Wave Table Synthesis (Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth) available as an option on my laptop. (2) These parameters have to be reset every time I boot up and there seems to be a glitch in the system when I insert the sound card after having booted up. My MIDI player doesn't produce any output under this condition.The last sound card I owned was a Turtle Beach PCMCIA card which I used with my Packard Bell laptop running Windows 3.1. Turtle Beach seemed to have it all together on this sound card and I've not heard any sound card since which has come up to the quality I enjoyed with that one.Oliver