Compaq being the bad guy ?

[Oric]

My wife has a Compaq Deskpro EN p600 series at work. Her PC has microphone and speaker connectors on the case but the technical support of their office supplier told her that her PC is not multimedia. Tonight I visited her office and took the cover of her case to discover a ESS 1869F chip integrated into her motherboard. When I tried to install the ESS 1869 driver that I downloaded from the Compaq support site that driver reports no sound hardware ?? There are no visible disable/enable feature for onboard sound support in the BIOS. What is the explanation for this ? Is there a seperate boot diskette to access secret parts of Compaq BIOS ? How can there be an ESS1869 chip and no harware detection ??

 

[Adul]

maybe a bad sound chip so they sould it without multimedia support.

Dunno taking a guess. try going to ESS website and use their drivers.

 

[Oric]

I was doing a parallel search in the Compaq support database. I am glad to see I am not the only one !

" Your folks need to talk to each other. The problem is already
described in a customer advisory issued by Compaq last
month:http://www5.compaq.com/support/techpubs/customer_advisories/DA000912_CW02_0.html,
however, updating the system to DirectX v7.1 did not resolve my
problem either. When audio drivers are installed and the system
is rebooted, the error:
"3Com EuSynth: ADI/ICH Hardware not present. 3Com EuSynth will be
unavailable." is displayed. In addition, if I look at the audio
device under system properties, an icon is displayed for the
driver but the text field is blank. Is there anything else we can
try?"

Their suggestion is not helpful !

1. Make sure there is no entry for ADI or 3Com under Add/ Remove
Programs. If there is, then uninstall it.
2. Install the latest drivers.
3. Install the most recent version of Direct X. You must use at
least Direct X 6.1a.

If this doesn't work, then please send an email to support, and
we will research it.

Yeah right ! Install the drivers ! How many times do I have to do that sir ??

 

[Adul]

Try the drivers from ess.

 

[Windogg]

Is it disabled by a jumper on the mobo?

Windogg

 

[Von Ribbentrop]

Windogg is right. You didn't mention what OS but if it's not showing up in the device manager as a sound device, then it's probably disabled via a Jumper. Check near the CD audio connector or near the ESS chip itself, it should be marked.

 

[Oric]

The Compaq runs on Windows 95 OSR 2.1