Now, I realise laptops aren't the best for gaming, but I've been able to play most of my favourite games on here so I know it works. Mostly. I first had this problem with Sudeki (some of you might remember I posted about that and Starforce a while ago), but I just turned off the voices and got on with it. Now I'm getting it with Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (I know it's supposed to suck, but a friend offered to let me borrow it since I was looking for something new).


The problem I'm having is that any voices and sound effects outside of cutscenes are insanely high-pitched and play way too fast (chipmunk style). I've tried Googling it, but most laptop problems seem to be getting sound working at all, not specific problems. Outside of these two instances, the sound works perfectly.


I'm hoping someone here will know of a fix or workaround for this that doesn't involve playing the game silently, since I don't want to screw around with settings and drivers beyond my understanding.

Specs:
Intel Celeron1.5 GHz
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
448 MB RAM
80GB Hard drive

Since the problem is with sound, information about the hardware related to that would be useful too, no? Unfortunately, there's a few things listed:
Audio Codecs
Legacy Audio Drivers
Media Control Devices
Realtek AC'97 Audio

Yes, I'm the first to admit I lack a lot of knowledge in this area. Can anyone help?

Another piece of information is that neither of these games (Sudeki or TR: AoD) are being played off the CD. Sudeki wasn't because I had to get rid of Starforce and TR isn't because you apparently don't need them with a full install.

Alright, so apparently adding "chipmunk" to a search in Google yields a lot of results. I found a site which offered a promising and probably obvious tip: lower the hardware acceleration. I do this, but whenever I loaded the game it rests the damned thing. So I turned it off instead, and it worked

So, uh...carry on.

hardware acceleration for sound is rarely worth it, unless you've got one of the 5 or 6 cards that developers had in mind.

cool environmental effects are still totally feasible in software since rarely would that kind of thing require any heavy waveform analysis. in some cases hardware acceleration can actually be slower due to bus speeds.

it would be nice if sound card designers could take a more unified approach like videocard designers have..

Yes. Most newer games use stuff like Miles Sound System or FMOD that supports both hardware and software. In FMOD, software processing of even very intensive DSP is almost always faster in software.

I didn't even know it was on. Or existed. I'm more of a "front end" user, I guess, I tend not to fiddle around with settings in the control panel if I can help it.