Computer question

[Jay_Gatsby]

Quick question for the computer-savvy folks on the board. My home computer currently gives me the message "no audio device" under sound/audio on the control panel, and therefore I have no sound. I was working fine until last week. The sound card is an on-board one, and appears to be working fine, but I bought a cheap PCI card as a quick fix just in case the on-board sound card had gone bad. Still no sound. I've reinstalled all the drivers for both sound cards, changed the settings in the BIOS (disabled on-board to allow the PCI card to work, and vice-versa), and ensured that there are no device conflicts by doing the same thing in the Windows settings. At this point, I'm tempted to simply do a full system restore to factory settings, but then I'm going to lose all of the applications I've installed over the past year, which is not a pleasant thought.

Ideas? I'm at my wits end these days.

If you are running Windows XP, you can do a system restore and set it back to when it was working. Simple to do, takes about 5 minutes. Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Restore

[donheff]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cut-Throat If you are running Windows XP, you can do a system restore and set it back to when it was working. Simple to do, takes about 5 minutes. Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Restore

Interesting. I had exactly the same no device problem last week. I was finally able to get it fixed by doing a system restore to a few weeks back -- before the problem occurred. Not that we have that fixed, let me hijack the thread to my new problem.

DWs office excessed some laptops a year ago and I gave one to a friend. We installed XP on it and added a wireless PCMCIA card so they could access the home network (actually, I set up their home network but that is another story). At any rate, everything worked fine for months and suddenly they were unable to get on the Internet. They were connecting to their access point but not getting an IP address. They brought it to my house and same problem. I tried reloading the drivers - no cigar. I tried two different cards - no cigar. I wiped the whole damn PC and installed a XP fresh - still no cigar. It won't pick up an IP address with DHCP and it won't work if I put in a fixed IP. I can't think of anything in the laptop that would cause this problem to occur across cards and independent of the software base.

This seems totally weird to me.

[azanon]

Jay it sounds like you have covered the basics, but to be sure, if you disabled your on-board sound (in bios), then rebooted - that would uninstall the onboard sound. Then you could reboot again, go back into bios, and reenabled the onboard sound, then when you restart windows again, it should detect the onboard sound and install the associated hardware.

If the disabling (in bios) and reenabling doesnt trigger a reinstall of the hardware, then that is an abnormal behavior for Windows XP. Then again, it was also odd that it didnt prompt you for a hardware install of the add-on sound board. If either actually installed, you really should see an audio device listed.

Make sure you dont have both sound drivers installed at the same time (the on-board sound and the add-in sound board). You dont just want to disable the onboard sound if you're using an add-on board, you also want to make sure you just have one of the two sound card drivers/software installed on the pc at any given time (via add/remove programs).

Don, sounds like a hardware problem to be. Specifically where the card is seated in the slot. Could have been bumped. Try this. Connect an Ethernet Cable directly to the router and see if the laptop will function. If it does, it's most likely the wireless connection itself, since you have tried various cards.

JUst a guess.

[donheff]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cut-Throat Don, sounds like a hardware problem to be. Specifically where the card is seated in the slot. Could have been bumped. Try this. Connect an Ethernet Cable directly to the router and see if the laptop will function. If it does, it's most likely the wireless connection itself, since you have tried various cards. JUst a guess.

You may be right something wrong with the slot - weird that it can log onto the access point but not be able to get an IP. I can't plug it into the router because it doesn't have a network card. If I borrowed one of the PCMCIA network cards I would probably run into the same bad slot. Actually, on second thought, there are two slots and the card doesn't work on either of them so, if the problem is hardware, it is further up. Oh well, DWs office is about to unload a couple of more laptops - I will swap it.

As long as all of you techies are out there I have another question regarding the XP license. All DWs machines come wiped (law office). My friend loaded XP-pro from a CD he had for a home PC. When I couldn't get the thing working here I initially tried to run the XP repair routine from an XP-Pro CD I have. After the routine reinstalled the system software (without wiping everything else) it made me call MS to get an activation code - I was not expecting that. When the wireless card still wouldn't work, I did a full install of XP and another call to MS. Is my license about wore out at this point? What happens if I need to reinstall XP on the machine I bought it for?

[Jay_Gatsby]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cut-Throat If you are running Windows XP, you can do a system restore and set it back to when it was working. Simple to do, takes about 5 minutes. Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Restore

Nope. Didn't work. In fact, Windows can't even restore it to certain points, even though such points do appear to be available for restoration. That said, it did successfully restore the machine to a late-November configuration, but still no audio device detected.

I put a new sound card in a PCI slot, and the computer has both detected it and loaded the appropriate driver. Still no audio device detected. Any other suggestions?

I have my system recovery disks, and am tempted to restore the machine to factory condition to see if that solves the problem. Yes, it will be annoying, but then again, it's cheaper than buying a new PC. If that doesn't work, perhaps a new cheap CPU unit is in order. I wouldn't mind having one that can burn DVDs that are playable on my big TV, and DVDs make it much easier to back up the machine periodically (768 Mb vs. 4 Gb+).

[Retiredtwice]

To: Donheff
re your computer issue (not connecting to the wireless router / Internet). Does the router hide the SSID (not broad casted)? This is an option when you customize the wireless router. If so, there is a glitch in XP that will cause symptoms similar to yours if a PC looses connectivity. Check the Microsoft Knowledge base for symptoms and solution.

[donheff]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Retiredtwice To: Donheff re your computer issue (not connecting to the wireless router / Internet). Does the router hide the SSID (not broad casted)? This is an option when you customize the wireless router. If so, there is a glitch in XP that will cause symptoms similar to yours if a PC looses connectivity. Check the Microsoft Knowledge base for symptoms and solution.

Thanks but I have the router set to broadcast the SSID. The problem occurs with other access points also.