.wav's play, but no sound

I just set up a Win NT system from scratch on a Dell 4100 with 733 Intel. Everything went pretty smooth as the Resource CD had all the drivers. Life was good.

Here's the problem. I loaded the system up on my test bench and didn't have the speakers plugged in. I played a .wav file just to see if it would play though. (You can see the indicator move on volume control when it's maximized.) All seemed normal. Everything appeared as though it was playing sound.

I take the system out to it's user and plug everything up. When the user is booting up for the first time, I noticed it didn't play the windows log-on sound. Thinking this was odd, I pushed the user aside ( :p ) and played a .wav manually. No-Go. I opened up the volume control and everything still looked normal.

Now let me do the id10t checklist-->
Everything was set to play in volume control.
Speakers were plugged in.
Mulitmedia on Control Panel was set to use the Sound Blaster card.
Every other nit-noid place I could think of was set up to play .wav's with SB card and volume was turned up.
SB card is well seated in PCI slot.

I went to SoundBlaster.com and grabbed the latest drivers. Still No-Go. What am I missing? Any thoughts?

(One more note: The system is dual-boot with W2K on seperate physical hard drive. Sound works good in W2K. :confused: )

I'll be surprised if this helps but I had an NT4 problem with a SoundBlaster a couple weeks ago that did the same thing. I reinstalled the driver 4 times before it started working.....might waste a little time but....????

That's the only thing I can come up with. You know how it is, the really hard stuff hits you right at the end of shift and you don't have time to stay and figure it out...

I'll try that first thing in the morning. If that doesn't fix it...well, I'll STILL be banging my head on the desk. :rolleyes:

Something just occured while I was typing. What about IRQ's/resources? Hmmmm......

Don't forget to try the card in different slots as well. Also don't forget to reserve IRQ5 for Legacy Devices in the motherboard BIOS...

does it play audio cd's??????......This is a way to test the hardware, as the cd-rom to audio cable to sound card output is a pure hardware test!!

It DOES play Audio CD's. It's kind of weird though. If you put the CD in the tray, it tells you the "device is not ready." But if you right click and choose explore, you can individually select the track and it plays.

Still doesn't play .wav files. Tried re-installing drivers several times. Still No-Go. Tried swapping PCI slots. We can't seem to get it to land on IRQ5. It's been at IRQ 9 and 3.

Oh...and there IS NO area to reserve IRQ 5 for legacy devices in BIOS. (It has Dell BIOS.)

Banging head against desk in between key strokes. :confused:

Just for kicks, if you install any other card does that work?

Hi All,

NT4.0 is a bam pain in the butt when it comes to sound and loading drivers (Plug and Play). I also had a SB Sound Card that would work, i installed the drivers over and over again, until finally i tried restalling Service Pack 5 (latest at the time) this for an amazing reason made it work, i think there is a file that the service pack updates or something. If all else fails with NT try the latest Service Pack.

Hope this helps

Did you manually install the sound drivers or did you run the PNPISA.INF file? Some Plug N Pray cards don't like being manually installed under NT4 and are solved by locating the PNPISA.INF file on the NT4 cd, right clicking it & selecting INSTALL, then rebooting.

Might be worth a try if not already done.

Ok. Update here. Our entire tech depart is now slamming thier heads against the desk.

Service pack re-install doesn't work.

The sound card works....the system is a dual boot and sound works fine under W2K.

PNPISA.inf didn't work. (I wouldn't suspect that it would as this is a PCI card, but I'll try anything at this point.)

Here's the kookie part. This is where it gets strange. *Warning* Divert your eyes if you think computers do what they are supposed to. Here' s the kicker--> While using Sound Blaster Diagnostics, I had a .wav file set up to loop constantly, so that any change I made, I'd know right away if it worked. Well, I had gotten frustrated (agian) and I sat back away from the keyboard for a while. That's when I noticed it.

I had the volume control panel up and active and PC Speakers was muted and so was CD Digital Balance. I thought this odd, I hadn't muted them. So I unchecked the "mute" box. Well, low-and-behold, the next time that .wav looped through the boxes re-checked themselves to mute!!!!! WTF is going on here. This happens every time. Uncheck the boxes--> next time sound loops...the boxes automatically re-check themselves! <IMG SRC="smilies/eek.gif" border="0">

Has anyone seen this before? Any help is appreciated.

Being a PCI doesn't make any difference to the PNPISA file as it scans for PNP hardware not just PNP ISA Hardware.

Well. I hate to keep bringing this topic up. I'll let it die this time though. We found a fix. One of the techs here found a patch that deals with this problem. I have no idea where it was. If anyone wants any more info, I'll post it.

But, it all turned out to be a software patch. Hmmm... <IMG SRC="smilies/rolleyes.gif" border="0">