Last week, I informed you fine people of the lightning strike that seemingly took out my computer hard drive and fried the motherboard, all on account of my stupidly leaving my computer on during a lightning storm and a misplaced trust in a surge surpressor I found out wasn’t even a surge surpressor.
My computer’s still in the local repair shop – been there since LAST Thursday (“We’ll have it back to you by tomorrow if you get it in by five o’ clock!” Sheee, yeah.) – but I dragged my father’s computer over there yesterday and had them transfer my files to his hard drive so I can get some work done. So I’m using my Pop’s computer at the moment.
Everything seems okay, except I can’t play music, DVDs or videos on Pop’s computer. I’m pretty sure I have everything hooked up right, and it was working fine before. I keep getting this DirectSound Driver error message and I have only a vague idea how to proceed from here.
Anyway, I’ve broken out all sorts of XP installation disks on hand and I’m just waiting for a knowledgable person to suggest a remedy. I’ve got hours.
Well, this computer is a Dell Pentium 4, barely used. I suspect thye computer shop knocked something out of whack when they transferred files yesterday, but I was hoping it was a relatively minor fix as to avoid going over there AGAIN and having them do it. My luck they’ll take another three days to fix it.
Can you give us the exact model of your Dell computer? Is it a 2400 for example?
Fo some reason the PC has ‘lost’ the drivers that are needed to control the soundcard.
You can check this by looking in the ‘device manager’.
You can get into your device manager (assuming your running Windows xp )by right clicking my computer and selecting manage, then select device manager. If you see an icon with a yellow ! beside it then it means you need some extra software to get it working. Check in your device manager for any yellow exclamation or question marks next to your sound devices.
Ponster. Oh. Uh… Dell P780 on a 128 ATI DDR Raedon 9700 TX w/ TV-out. I think. That’s what it says under “Display Properties.”
Question mark spotted in Device Manager by “Other Devices” and the Multimedia Audio Control. Now what? No other icon has any such warning. Does that have anything to do with the speakers?
Yes, it means that the computer has lost the instructions (drivers) needed to make the soundcard work. The soundcard converts sound files into the wonderful music that comes out of your speakers
Dell P780 isn’t really what I’m looking for. It’s the model number of the screen (hence Display Properties) and not the actual computer. It should be written on the computer unit somewhere.
Or you can try to locate your service tag. This link will explain where to find it.
Once you have the service tag you we can easily get the missing files for the soundcard (though there’s a chance you already have them on a cd somewhere)
Sorry, I didn’t see your last post when I had posted my last relpy
According to dell.com you have either a
Analog Devices ADI 198x Integrated Audio
or a
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital
I can’t really tell from here but we can get away with trying one and if it doesn’t work going with the other
So download these small (4mb) programs from the Dell ftp server (just click on the link) and save them somewhere. When you run the rpogram, it’ll detect if you have the proper soundcard and if so, install the correct drivers. You may need to reboot after this.
If you try one of the programs and it doesn’t find your soundcard then it just means that you need to try the other program instead.
OIr you could try the easy fix first. Frequently, Windows has a copy of the correct driver in the driver archive folder that can be reinstalled easily. Open the Device Manager (click Start, Right click My Computer, click Properties, click the Hardware tab, click Device Manager). Locate the devices with the yellow question marks. right click on them, and select Uninstall. Reboot your computer, and windows will automatically detect the devices and try to install the correct drivers. If they are on your hard drive, they will install automatically; if not, proceed with Ponster’s method.
Well I’m glad that it’s working for you after all that
I’d just like to say that in my experience, if the computer detects the card then it’s normally working and just needs the correct drivers. What Fear Itself explained would be what would have happened if a tech removed the old card and replaced it with a new card. XP would have rebooted, detected the card and found the right drivers.
But if you had uninstalled the old card drivers (almost the same as physically removing it) and rebooted, XP should have found the correct drivers and fixed it.
Again, glad it’s all workng, but I’d have hung on to the old card anyhow
I tried Fear Itself’s methods, your suggestions and it still didn’t work. My computer gave me no indication that the sound card wasn’t working. I called the shop and the owner’s son tried to walk me through the steps over the phone — nothing. I took it down to the computer shop and the owner’s son fiddled with it on two different machines for an hour without success and when the owner showed up, he couldn’t get it to work, either— until he swapped out the soundcard. Got it running within a minute.
You know, the computer shop owner tried to hand me back my original soundcard as I was walking out the door – I asked, “What’s this for?” He said, “You might need it again,” to which I replied, “I can’t imagine why,” and handed it back.
