Some sound problems

I just bought my computer second hand. I have no start up CD's. I'm running Win 98. I'm on a LAN. 56K/133mhz. I only get sound when I play certain games & certain screensavers. They come in loud & clear. The rest is bearly audible, if at all. I also get a message that my device is not available. I have downloaded all the drivers to get it current. I have gone to the device manager and removed the CDROM, Rebooted, the computer, it did recognize it and found it. I have an old magitronic (no longer in business). I'm not a computer geek, but I am capable of troubleshooting. I have done everything I know to do. Please help. Thanks, ahead.

 

Have you tried deleting the sound card drivers and reinstalling them?

 

Yeah that is the problem with smaller manufactures. The computer industry is a hard industry to survive in (especially with the recent recession) and the 5 major companies (dell, hp, compaq, ibm and nec) make up at least 50% of the entire market. And now, with the fairly recent merger of hp and compaq they are now the largest and most powerful company. I think it is like 30% they make up alone. (I don't remember the exact numbers so they might be off slightly.) Doesn't leave much room for anybody else that wants to get by... especially now because Americans aren't buying as many computers as they used to. This business used to be profitable for manufactures of pcs because they had to make their own mobo, cpu, ram sometimes OS, and all that stuff, and you couldn't do that on your own so the they had to do it for you. (of course, back then there weren't a whole lot of people interested in computers but they also cost a lot more) Now you can stroll on down to the local computer store, buy all your parts and have a reliable, working computer in a few hours (including time spent at the store and driving back to your home) that will last you a few years, and more and more people (it seems) are turning to that method to control the quality of their components. BTW... for anyone who is interested this is the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the first IBM personal computer. (once they finally didn't use punch cards anymore) I remember when we first got our first computer back in '88. I was just a little kid but it was so cool. I'm pretty sure it was a Tandy and I would play on it every day but all we had was a word processing program and no games (I don't think games were really around yet) so I would hack away on the keyboard punching random keys in the word processor because I couldn't read all that well yet. I remember that printer took over a minute (from what I remember) to print one page. Those daisy wheel printers were something. Man, computers have come a long way since then. That computer didn't have a hard drive, ram was unheard of (well, unnecessary too), and those little 8 in. green monochrome monitors were pretty cool too. (where did the 80s go? I may have been young but I do remember them) Guess this became a topic for the random discussion... oh well. Might as well saunter on back there.

 

There is about 50 different things that have to do with sound. I am not sure which to select. Can you give me information on where to locate my sound card drivers? Do I have to deinstall, then reinstall, or do I just remove them? After I do the deinstall or removal, do I restart, then reinstall or add them back in? After the removal or deinstall, how do I find them to reinstall or add them back in? Sorry about all the questions, just want to get it right and not ruin anything else. Thanks for the support!

 

... no problem. Ok, provided you have the drivers in hand (or else you should make sure you can get them or download them first) then you go to my computer and right click and click on properties. This will bring you to "system properties" then click on "device manager" and click the + on "sound, video and game controllers". Click on all the sound card drivers and click "remove" at the bottom. You will have to restart then and after windows boots up you will get plug n'play trying to install microsoft's drivers for the sound card. Don't use them and just click cancel. Once in windows pop in the cd for the soundcard (or start the install if it is on your comuter already if you downloaded it or something) and follow those instructions. This should clear your crappy audio but post back whether you have problems or fix it so we know how it went. The reason it probably isn't good to delete the drivers if you can't get new ones somewhere is then you might have no audio instead of bad audio.

 

Thanks Mike, for your help. it still hasn't worked. Last night I sat up on this computer and went through everything in the help menu to try to troubleshoot this problem. Nothing worked, including the removal of my sound (soundblaster). I am telling you, I followed each and everything the help menu suggested. No help. I did notice in my device manager that there is a place that I can click that says show devices that are connected and when clicked in, it shows that I have no sound connected. I know I have sound, because yesterday my sister and I were "IM-ing," and she sent me an email that had sound that about blasted me out of my chair, because I have everything turned up full blast, so I don't miss anything when it does start fully functioning. Yet when my email notifier and such things as media player are enabled I have no sound. My CD's play fine when I insert them, I hear them loud and clear, too. I promise you, I went through every step in my help menu to troubleshoot. Oh! I forgot to tell you that at the beginning of this T/S I did find that my computer had elected for me (how it does this I don't know) that it had disabled my CD ROM. It had done this once before and I couldn't play my own CD's until I discovered this and clicked that clear. Is that weird that it disabled itself?