Hi Dara, I hope this is not the case but you could have a hardware problem. The newer sound cards are multi-channel sound cards. A multi-channel card should be able to play music and have software speech going at the same time. The older sound cards were single channel and could only handle a single task at any given time. Now if you had speech and music going when that was a windows machine, then it's likely a software problem and may need you to adjust settings on your sound card; could be you have stuff adjusted so that other channels are running at 0% and if that's the case a little work with a mixer program should solve that problem. The rest of your questions I'm not yet in a position to answer since I've not yet installed gen2 over here, that's a project likely will get done in 2006.
