Going Nuts!! Sound won't work!! 1

[ginavg]

I have a Compaq with ME installed on it the sound just stopped working. There are no problems showing in device manager. I have tried everything. I decided to install a pci sound card the other sound is on the motherboard. I cannot figure out how to disable in Bios. It shows in the Bios that both sound (onboard and pci) have different irq's but there is no place to enable or disable.

I installed the PCI soundblaster with no problems I still have no sound. When I go to control panel multimedia I see under playback device wierd characters and I cannot go into advanced. Also under sound it is low and grayed out. I tried removing sounds in the os and re-installing but to no avail. Can anyone please help me?? Why would it be grayed out? I cannot control any sound through the os..

Thanks so much for any help

Gina

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi again,

I agree on the Windoze ME, a friend of mine had nothing but problems with his Compaq Presario which had Windows ME installed on it... I threw it out and installed W98SE with lots of updates and he hadn't any probs since...

at the moment there are only two stable OS's from Microsoft W98SE and W2K... at least that is my opinion...

Ben

 

[Cindy1]

I was surfing the web and I think that these sites will help you alot. They are Compaq sound drivers by models and o/s systems. You can find the reference driver for the ESS1989 chipset at Dr. Drivers:

http://www.drdriver.com/drivers/search-18-1-16.html

or at the ESS Homepage

http://www.esstech.com

http://www.soundcard-drivers.com/companies/236.htm

Cindy

 

[pudda]

Cindy1, if those are ESS drivers, the Windows Update should have pulled up updated drivers for them. Is it possible the new drivers got corrupted by the Update? The test continues...

 

[Cindy1]

I was thinking if she deleted her old drivers and sound and reinstalled the new drivers. I think we scared ginavg away, we haven't heard from her in awhile! I hope she didn't quit it is a pain in the begining.
Cindy

 

[wemoring]

Gina I finally got my sounds back. I found the statement in my System ini missing in the boot section.

drivers=mmsystem.drv
I added this and rebooted and the sound started to work again.

 

[ginavg]

wemoring...tried that I had drivers=mmsound.drv...when I changed them to mmsystem.drv it booted into safe mode..don't think it likes that!!

 

[ginavg]

Ok I have done everything that I can think of ... I delete all sound cards rebooted. Installed the drivers from the d\ drive which has all drivers from the restore disk....I have tried downloading new drivers...still everything is greyed out. under playback devices its greyed and says no playbeck devices. I cannot find anything that says analog or digital. I have ESS Allegro pcia audio 1989 as the device. This is just working with the stupid card on the board as I cannot even disable this device.

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

I dont have a ME machine in front of me but go into control panel, multimedia or sounds and multimedia, i believe it is the advance tab or device, under audio compression check and see what is loaded,(write them down) then remove the devices and then reboot then add new hardware, specify the device i think it is sound and gaming controllers then specify to show all hardware choose microsoft then reinstall the audio compression codecs, i believe this should fix the problem

 

[ginavg]

Ok guys and gals it's fixed....here's what I did. First grabbed a six pack. 2nd I contacted compaq and found out that you cannot disable the onboard cards via the BIOS.

3rd I disabled the video via device manager. 4th I installed a new pci card. 5th I installed the setup for the drivers on the creative pci cards. 6th I was prompted that new hardware was found. 7th I pointed to the appropriate place to install files even though some were not found. Finally a virtual device driver needed to be downloaded from the web.....and it works!!!

Thanks to all of you who spent all the time to help!! Have a great day and hopefully I can return the favor in the future!!

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi Gina,

Glad to have heard that all is working now...

well guess what... my sound disappeared also again... but found out that the onboard SoundBlaster didn't like having a screwed up Adaptec SCSI card onboard... as soon as I removed the card the Soundcard decided to work...

go figure... nothing on the system told me that there was a problem... just my CD drive made funny things and that brought me on to the SCSI card...

oh well,

have fun folks...

Ben

 

[pimplord]

my sound or audio device messed up so i tried to uninstall and then reinstall it but it says that i have to use the windows xp disc which i dont have. is there any other way that i can reinstall this from another site or something or what should i do?