Here's a good one for you sound card guru's !

[jyates]

I've seen a couple of desktop systems lately that have ISA Creative Labs sound blaster awe32 or awe64 sound cards in them
that are acting up and I thought maybe some of you guys may know the answer.

When you start windows up they make a short blip of a windows start up sound instead
of the full sound.

You can go into control panel and into sounds and test the various sounds that windows makes
on certain events but you get an message that says the sound card may be in use (it's not).

You can play an audio cd and the sound card works fine.

You can remove the sound card device out of the device manager and reinstall and that doesn't fix it.

You can go into windows setup (windows 98se) and remove the multimedia section and reboot and then
go back in and recheck it and let the components be installed again and that doesn't change it.

I've seen 2 machines with this problem in the last 2 weeks. I put pci sound cards in each of them and
that "fixed" it but I know the ISA sound cards worked perfectly in a test machine I have so I assume it was
a windows problem.

Anyone?

 

[LED]

Must be tired cause I really don't understand the problem but with any ISA card Windows does not use complete Plug and Pray and that may answer your questions as to why the PCI cards hit and the ISA's miss

 

[jyates]

The point is that the ISA cards HAVE been working
for like 2 years and then all of a sudden they
aren't working in their particular machines.
And NO ISA sound card will work in said machines
BUT a PCI sound card will work fine.

I can carry the non working ISA cards to another
machine and they will work fine in it.

All systems are win98se

It's not a matter of windows not detecting the
cards or not showing them properly in device manager.
By the looks everything is fine but when you try to
use the sound card it tells you that it's already
in use (which it is not being used by anything else).

It's like something in Windows has made up it's mind that
it isn't going to work with a ISA sound card but it will work
with a pci sound card.

Thanks,
Jim