Vista - Help needed with new PC connections

Hi there, I was wondering if anyone can offer any help for me setting up my new pc please. Iv just bought the following spec pc to replace one of about 5 years old. Mainly i use it for surfing the web, downloading music and films to watch. I have the pc connected to my 42 inch philips lcd tv and also connected to my pioneer ax3 home cinema amp (via 3.5mm jack to stereo imputs).

AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 Black Quad Core Processor AM3 (3.20GHz, 8MB Cache)
Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium with Service Pack 1, 64-bit - English
Midi-Tower ATX Chassis + 550W PSU + CardReader - Silver
ASUS M2N68-VM Mainboard, AM2+ with integrated HDMI/DVI/VGA Graphics - MATX
4GB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM - (2x 2GB)
1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive with 32MB Buffer [upg
Blu-Ray Combo Optical Drive (BluRay read, DVD and CD read and write)
1GB ATI HD4670 Graphics accelerator - DVI, DirectX 10.1 PCI Express 2 [upg
Multi-Format Memory Card Reader -(52-in-1 Internal)
7.1 High Definition onboard sound card - for 8 Channel Cinema sound
Logitech Cordless Keyboard & Cordless Optical Mouse
Free Microsoft® Works® 8.5 + Limited Microsoft Office Trial
Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem)
12 USB 2.0 ports (12 USB 2.0 ports (6 on back I/O, 6 on board) - ASUS M2N68-VM
Network Ready Gigabit LAN (10/100/1000

So here are the problems I have if anyone can offer some solutions / advice I would be very grateful!!!

1. Sound - Ideally I would like to connect the pc to my home cinema amp via optical toslink but when I connect it in this way no sound comes out. When I swop the connection to 3.5mm jack to stereo phone the sound is fine. Any ideas? Are there any settings on the PC I should be changing to get this to work??

2. If this is possible via optical I assume this will then stream standard 2.0 and 5.1 audio from dvd / blueray into my amp? I currently have and will be using cyberlink dvd9 for movies which i think i need to upgrade to ultra in order to be able view bluray?

Any ideas or comments would be a massive help, Thanks in advance.

Oh im running vista if that helps.

cheers

zoidburg

zoidburg welcome to the forums.

For the first you need to set it to SPDIF/optical out in the Windows playback settings.
For the second, yes it will be the standard 2.0 and 5.1 audio, unless your onboard supports something like Dolby Digital Live which will upmix the stereo signal to 5.1.

Thanks for your reply!

Sorry for being a bit of a thicko but where would I find the windows playback settings?

cheers!

Quickest and easiest is to right click on the speaker in the systray and select "Playback devices".