[RESOLVED] Curious sound shortfalls & USB

I've been running Win2K Pro for less than one week. Most things have been running OK except sound and USB. The card is recognized and installed fine (Creative SB16 Ensoniq PCI) but no sound comes out. Only MIDI formats like rmi or mid produce actual sounds. Wavs, MP3s and any CD or game sounds show they are playing but don't come through. It's somewhat intermittent, all sounds worked at first, then they didn't, then they did again but now it's only the MIDI stuff. Weird. I've tried the Win98 and NT drivers to no avail. Could it be format specific codecs that got lost or corrupted somehow? That's all I can come up with. Also, USB support is non-existant on my machine. It finds the controller built in to my mobo (Gigabyte GA-5X w/the latest BIOS) but only one of the two ports function. I also have a 2 port PCI card that is totally unrecognized. I emailed the cards manu. and all they said was wait until after Win2K is released for drivers (even though it never had any drivers of it's own). So, anyone who's read this rambling cry for help, do these things sound familiar at all? Is it Win2K or my crappy hardware (A judgement which I'm perfectly willing to accept).

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Less artsy, more fartsy.

Well, as far as the sound card goes, it sounds like your digital audio playback may have just died...I've seen it happen. Normally, driver problems don't act like that...it's indicitive of a hardware problem.

As for the USB problem...again, that sounds like a hardware problem if only one port is working, since they both operate off of the same controller chip. But the PCI USB card is a different story....Win2000 should have built-in drivers to cover that...have you tried looking for them?

Just for reference, the OEM/RTM version of Win2000 out there has every set of drivers Microsoft has developed so far for it...any new drivers most likely will come from the manufacturers of the hardware.

Even though MIDI formats play fine? That would suck, the sound card is less than 6 mo. old. It was cheap though.

I read on the Windows NT FAQ site that there are problems with Win2K recognizing PCI sound cards. They suggest disabling IRQ steering though the Compuiter Mgt. MMC snap-in. More detailed instructions at the site.

Regards

Originally posted by K:
I've been running Win2K Pro for less than one week. Most things have been running OK except sound and USB. The card is recognized and installed fine (Creative SB16 Ensoniq PCI) but no sound comes out.

My experience with Upgrade/Install of W2K is that like NT 4 before it, it is very fussy about shared interrupts. When I tried an upgrade from w98, setup wouldn't complete at the hardware detection stage. Even after scrapping and recreating the hard disk partition to remove the influence of W98, setup still hung. I removed my network card and internal modem and setup completed. Then I put the cards back in again, and under W2K control, there have been no Interrupt problems. The IRQ assignments have changed from what they were under W98.

There is some documentation on the W2K CD that allows you to customise setup to by-pass some of this, I was not lucky enough to find the readme.txt in deploy.cab before rebuilding my system. It is located in CDROM:\SUPPORT\TOOLS\DEPLOY.CAB

Hope that sheds some light on it.

Richard
[email protected]

The sound card started working last week, I'm not entirely sure what the problem was. USB card still won't budge, I'm just waiting for drivers to turn up.

That sounds *sorta* similar to what I'm experiencing with my MX300 (PCI PnP sound card) in Win2k. I get sound from video clips and Quake3, for example, but a few other games (like Pharaoh) give me no sound whatsoever. Both Quake 3 and Pharaoh use DirectSound, I believe, so I don't know what the problem is. I still have IRQ Steering enabled and my sound card is using IRQ14 (I have IDE disabled... pure SCSI), so either of those might suspect (thanks for the suggestions, guys.) I'm not sure if my problem is related to yours, but it may be.