This is my last computer sound related post. Promise.
After much research and tweaking, my situation is this:
My sound cuts out about 30 seconds after start up. If I disable the sound card and enable on board sound, the same thing happens.
I know it is not a speaker problem because Media Player tells me that there is no sound device to play music.
I know that I start with sound because I can hear Windows start up and I can play songs.
I have restarted my computer after disabling all startup programs. No improvement.
Virus?
Motherboard?
Could it be linked to the game OBLIVION that I am currently playing?
Don’t just disable the device; uninstall it and reboot, allowing Windows to reinstall the driver. You may need the disk or downloaded driver from the manufacturer to do this, though it is likely Windows already has the drivers.
If it was just one piece of hardware affected, I’d say it would be a dodgy capacitor somewhere, but for it to be affecting two different cards in the same way, it’s got to be drivers or configuration.
I don’t think it can be drivers, because it starts out working. I think something else that’s loading upon startup (but takes a few seconds to get itself into memory and running) is causing the problem.
Click Start>Run and type Msconfig and click OK, then uncheck everything in the Startup tab - click apply and restart the machine - does the sound work?
If so, launch MSconfig and check half of the entries, apply and restart - does it still work? If so, check half of the remaining unchecked entries - if not, uncheck half of the entries you checked - and continue halving until you find the culprit.
Thanks for your help on this sticky issue. I have uninstalled and reinstalled drivers till the cows come home. This is not a solution.
My two sound devices are an Audigy 4 soundcard and a Realtek on board sound device.
Are you sure it is not some sort of virus?
I have been uninstalling from Windows. Is this OK?
Windows constantly asks to reinstall drivers. Should I cancel these messages?
What about removing every sound driver I can find, removing the sound card and starting from scratch with the on board sound?
This all sounds so extreme. Is there not some other issue involved?
If both devices are enabled, that could be the problem; you can usually disable the onboard sound by going into the computer’s CMOS settings (not for the faint hearted though).
Alternatively, you could just disable the redundant sound device in the Windows Device Manager; Click Start>Run and type devmgmt.msc then find your realtek device, right-click it and select ‘disable’ (rather than uninstall, as that will just make Windows find it as a new device next restart).
I don’t know how old your computer is, or the operating system. I will say that older computers often had issues with interupt requests being shared. The result often was Windows not using the sound card and marking it conflict which is an exclamation point in the device manager. It might work at start up, but die in a few seconds when Windows is done loading. Add in USB cards, and video are often conflicting devices. Look for conflicted devices in the device manager.