Hello and welcome to Lesson 10: Computer Soundcards, brought to you by beyourownit.com where you can get free computer repair lessons updated weekly, and sometimes bi‑weekly, and sent right to your email or right on our website. So there’s a launched, when it comes to soundcards. Although it’s almost something we don’t really think about that often. What this soundcard is responsible for doing is translating the information passed to your computer, whether it’s a game, or you’re listening to music. Then it converts it into an audio signal that puts it out to your speakers.

Very, very important, very complex part inside of your computer, you can also use them for microphones, line out; you can use it line in. Sometimes, for some of them, you can convert your records to CDs and all sorts of things like that.

There are a couple of different configurations, and as most are computer repair lessons, which you would mostly, everyday things ‑ common occurrences ‑ we don’t want to bore you with every little detail.

There are two main types of soundcards. You’ve got your onboard soundcards, which by far is the most popular. It used to be that a lot of people avoided these because usually, people would be afraid that if something happens to my soundcard, how am I going to fix it? Am I going to have to put another motherboard in? Am I going to buy another soundcard?

Now that they’ve become so reliable and so affordable, I can’t remember seeing a computer come across my desk that didn’t have an onboard soundcard. It’s good for about 95% of the people. It’s not as if they’re not good. It’s just a very cost‑effective solution in a lot of cases.

It costs us a few dollars to have them on the motherboard, but not, like I said, most of them usually come with it.

Below you see a picture of a shot of a motherboard with an onboard sound, made a little bit different than what it used to because it’s all taken apart like this.

Here’s another one. This one’s got a lot more features ‑ surround sound features, and things like that. This thing is a stand‑alone soundcard. It looks something like this.

Why would you use a stand‑alone soundcard? Well, if you wanted to upgrade the quality of the sound; if you wanted to use something like surround sound or DTS; if you’re a gamer, and you really want to get that high quality audio surround sound HD or XD, they call it; you’re going to want to go for a stand‑alone soundcard in a lot of cases because they’re just going to outperform most of your amp board systems.

Installing them is just about as easy as it gets. You install the software. Turn off the computer. Plug in the card. Turn on your computer. That’s about it.