I purchased an "M Audiophile 192" pci soundcard earlier this year. It's been working fine since than. Last week I purchased a usb device to watch television on a pc through usb! The device installs it's own driver [I assume], because when you choose what recording input you would like you see the company name of the usb video device.
What does this have to do with anything you ask?
Well when I installed the usb device to watch tv on my pc I kept getting video problems so I kept uninstalling and restoring my pc back to an earlier date [with winxp home sp2's system restore feature]. I tried to install the usb device like 5 times and never really got it to work well. But that's besides the point...
Since I restored my pc quite a few times from installing and uninstalling the usb devices software, I noticed that there were some files being saved by system restore when the pc rebooted during the "successful restore" screen. One of the files I could swear kept getting saved each time I'd restore my pc is something named "wdmaud.drv".
I took the liberty of looking up this "wdmaud.drv" file with windows search doggie! & well it showed it as being a files in "WINDOWS/SYSTEM32" folder. I assume it's very important... But I have more than one! Check this out:
I am willing to believe that it's something system restore did from all the darn times I installed and uninstalled that usb video device. It must have conflicted with some sort of driver setting and duplicated it many times [if those are drivers - I'm not that pc savvy as you may think]. Or it must be for restore points or something. Well anyways what's the point of my thread?
Well yesterday I decided to delete all of those four similar files you see there before I went to bed thinking they were junk files. But when I woke up and turned my pc on I noticed that my sound didn't work! Remember I have a pci audio soundcard I bought earlier this year [I mentioned this at the beginning of my post], and I also use my internal motherboard sound too [I generally switch between both for different connection reasons]. Anyways I couldn't even set my windows sound to my "M Audio 192" sound card or my internal onboard motherboard sound. So I freaked out and chose to restore my pc to a few days earlier.
When I did that my sound came back and I checked my "WINDOWS/SYSTEM32" folder, and those files from the picture were there once again. What gives? What are these files? What are they for? & can I delete the duplicate ones? Are each of them there for a different reason such as one for my pci card, one for my onboard motherboard sound, and a couple maybe left over from the back usb video/audio tv device I tried to install?
I'm not touching them until I know what to do. Someone please help. My pc is working fine but I don't want duplicate files or trash on my pc. Especially anything in my "WINDOWS/SYSTEM32" folder.
- Thanks
PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH THESE.
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