Compaq onboard sound card hell

Alright, so my hand-me-down computer is a Compaq Deskpro still running Windows 98. I know that's just asking for trouble, but really, I need some help here.

The Deskpro has an integrated, onboard sound card - an ESS 1869 sound card that was pretty good until I bought myself a Hercules 5.1 surround PCI card. I installed the thing as well as the latest drivers and whatnot, everything seemed to be going good, until I realized the sound was still going through the onboard ESS sound card, while the PCI card wasn't doing anything at all.

So I tried using the Windows 98 Device manager to disable the two ESS audio devices that were listed; one was an "Control Interface" the other a "Plug-n-Play AudioTable". Didn't work. Instead of audio coming out of the wrong sound card, I got NO audio whatsoever.

Then I went into the BIOS, and set the "onboard audio" setting under the "Onboard Devices" tab to "disabled." That solved NOTHING.

So, I looked for a jumper or somesuch on the motherboard. Nope, no jumper.

So now I'm confused and frustrated and rather angry. Anyone have any idea of the twisted inner workings of the Compaq Deskpro? Anyone have a similar situation? Or does anyone wanna possibly send me a new Alienware computer to shut me up?

 

Howdy there lordbyronius...

Can you go into the Control Panel and double click on Multimedia, and make sure that the Preferred palyback device is the PCI card ?

 

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately I tried what you said, and the Multimedia section ONLY lists the ESS sound card and NOTHING else.

Hmm... There just HAS to be a jumper somewhere that'll solve this that I just missed somewhere... how else to explain how nothing else works?

 

Is the PCI sound card showing up in Device Manager ?

 

Hi, my comp is a compaq presario with ESS onboard sound. A few months ago I decided to put all our old LP records onto cd's. Thinking ESS was not much good I put in a creative vibra and started my project. Turned off the onboard sound via msconfig.exe and proceeded. Guess what? The ESS is much better than any PCI soundcard. You will notice, if you get it up and running that the soundcard will emit an earsplitting crack every few minutes and will gobble up disk space with various non-essential sound applications. The Vibra lasted one week before being pulled out. Hey, everyone to their own, good luck with your new sound card but ESS comes in a winner as far as recording and true reproduction are concerned.