Go into the bios for your computer. Usually you need to hit either F2, F8 or Delete as soon as your computer starts booting. While there, I'd also consider turning off your serial and parallel ports and anything else you may not have or use (like our favorite 3.5" floppy drive, etc...)

Be careful there if you aren't used to working in it as you can really screw things up on your machine.

--Ben

You should be able to just disable it in XP so that XP doesn't use it.
But sure, If you know you absolutely won't be needing it then do it in BIOS.

...And it can't be said enough times!! be carefull in the BIOS, some setting require a reinstall of XP to work... and if you don't reinstall you end up with a fucked up system.

Best Regards,

Probably there is no need to fool around with the BIOS (unless you absolutely know what you're doing as suggested above). In Windows XP just go to "Control Panel" "System" and "Device Manager". Find the sound card you want to disable in the list and either double click on it or click "Properties". Then there should be an option that says something like "Do not enable this device" or something to that effect (sorry, I'm typing this on a Mac while trying to remember exact Windows wording!) Then the system will not recognize it and you should be o.k.

I just recently added an editing system with the Matrox RT.X100 capture card. It was only AFTER buying an M-Audio Delta 1010LT audio card that I read on Matrox's site that their card will not work with M-Audio products (doh!). I thought I was going to have to settle for using a cheap Soundblaster card for everything until I realized I could use the above method to disable the card when I want to capture into Premier Pro (unfortunately using a cheap card to capture audio) and enable it when I want to work with multichannel and use the features of the Delta 1010LT.

Hope this helps. have fun!

Rob

Fooling with the BIOS can indeed screw up your system (to the point where it won't boot at all), however this will never lead to require a reinstall of your operating system. If you ever get to the situation where, after making some changes in BIOS, your computer won't start, all you have to do is open the case, momentarily remove the battery, temporarily move a jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS settings (all this will be in the manual that came with themotherboard) and the system will boot with defaut BIOS settings. However at that stage, in order to get your system working at it's best you would need to establish certain critical settings for your particular system (such as CPU frequency, hard drive detection, etc etc.

But don't be too scared to go into BIOS and disable your onboard sound card. The appropriate setting will most likely be under the Advanced System Settings or similar - just keep looking for the reference to the soundcard and disable it. Similarly the onboard midi should be disabled. By disabling just these settings you will not risk your computer not booting and you will certianly not need to re-install anything. The advantage in disabling the sound (and the midi) in BIOS is that it frees up resources (namely IRQ channels) for your system.

Fooling with the BIOS can indeed screw up your system (to the point where it won't boot at all), however this will never lead to require a reinstall of your operating system. If you ever get to the situation where, after making some changes in BIOS, your computer won't start, all you have to do is open the case, momentarily remove the battery, temporarily move a jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS settings (all this will be in the manual that came with themotherboard) and the system will boot with defaut BIOS settings.

Deactivating ACPI among other things require a reinstall of Windows!!
A general ruel is not to configure BIOS after windows is installed.
But the soundcard is such a small thing so it will not be a problem.

I can't confirm that 'de-activating ACPI requires a re-install of Windows', but certainly many many people do tweak the BIOS after installing Windows. Overclockers for a start, and people like me who continue to fine tune their systems. It is simply not true to say that 'it is a general rule not to configure BIOS after windows is installed'