Sound Card Issue

[trebor]

I have a friend who has a Compaq computer with an integrated sound card. All of a sudden he was having problems with the sound. If he played a music CD, the music was "garbled' - kind of like skipping parts of the song. Some of his email with sound would play OK and others would be garbled. The normal WINDOW sounds were "shaky" or "garbled". Then the system simply stopped any sounds. I helped him disable the integrated sound card and installed a PCI sound card. All we got was static (at best). So removed the PCI card, re-enable the integrated sound card. Tried again to produce sound - no luck. At this point, I was thinking there was a problem with the motherboard. A few hours later, he called and said he received an email with a song in the background and it played just fine. But could not get sound from anything or where else. He is running WIN 98 SE. Any ideas????

[Drew]

Try disabling on the onboard sound in the BIOS, then uninstall it from Windows. (Actually do that in reverse...disable it in the bios on the reboot of the uninstall). That may do the trick. I had a similar problem, where I had normal windows sounds, but my ATI All-In-Wonder TV player didn't 'respond' to sound controls. (There was sound, but sliding the volume control back and forth did nothing.) To fix that, I ran though the TV 'setup' initializer, and picked the sound card I was using (which happened to be onboard...my soundblaster live went fritzy a while back), and that fixed the problem.

Sounds like what you have is in reverse. There is also a setting in the Sounds section of the Control Panel, which lets you determine what sound device Windows should use. You may want to look into that...it may be 'remembering' the bad on board one.

[rhconley]

You might also try upgrading or reinstalling the onboard sound card driver before you make any other hardware changes. That sometimes does the trick.