I've been trying to upgrade my Gateway Essential 500c to play late 90s games smoothly, and so far I have worked out most of the issues in the system. It seems now that it doesn't like to use external PCI sound cards, as during driver installation, under both Windows 98 SE and Windows XP SP2, the system will either reset (Windows XP SP2) or hard crash (Windows 98 SE). This is with both a Soundblaster Live! Value and a Soundblaster Audigy 2 (installed separately). I made sure to disable the onboard sound in BIOS before installing the sound cards. The onboard sound works just fine under Windows 98 SE.

I'm wondering if it has something to do with the Radeon 9250 I'm running in it, as it is also a PCI card. I'm also thinking that it might have something to do with the sound cards not being in the first PCI slot, as they have both been in the last slot. The first PCI slot is free, because my video card doesn't seem to like running in that slot, so would it be worth a shot to move the card, or does it have more to do with the Radeon 9250 somehow?

I'm currently aiming to put XP SP2 on it and use the SB Audigy 2 as the sound card. Any help is greatly appreciated!

System Specs:

Sparkle SPI350MB 350W SFX 80 Plus PSU
Intel Gateway Bryant Motherboard (i810E Chipset)
Intel Pentium III EB 1000/256/133
512MB (2x256MB) SK Hynix PC-100 @ 133MHz 2-2-2-6
ATi Radeon 9250 128MB DDR 64-Bit PCI
Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2 PCI
Maxtor 2B020H1 5400 RPM ATA-100 (Limited to ATA-66 by chipset)
AOpen IDE5232 52x32x52x CD-RW drive
3.5" 1.44MB FDD