As most soundcards tend to come with bundled CD‑ROM interfaces, they tend to be full‑length, and the built‑in interface tends to be an unnecessary complication when setting up the machine. The problem, then, was to get a soundcard that had a high enough performance to give a decent sound quality on both recording and playback, but was short enough to fit into one of the remaining 'short' slots.

Unfortunately, this fan is tall enough to interfere with all but three of the expansion slots, all of which were taken up by a video capture card (VideoBlaster RT300), an accelerated graphics card and a high‑speed VL bus disk controller. Since the machine was fitted with a clock 'tripled' processor (x4 in Intel‑speak), it needed to have a fan to keep the CPU chip cool enough to operate. The problem was that although the PC's main circuit board had six or seven 'full length' expansion slots, not all of them could be used for full‑length cards. I also found that I could get quite good results dropping AVI files down to video tape using a Creative Labs TVCoder External. I was setting up a multimedia development system on a 486DX4/100 PC, and needed a soundcard for capturing and testing audio files. I had a bit of an odd problem last month. If you thought you had hassles finding a CD‑ROM drive to work with your PC, you haven't entered the soundcard zone.

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