[SharonMurray]

I would welcome some advice please.

I am having an intermittant problem with sound on my computer.
Sometimes it plays fine - especially if I reboot when it starts misbehaving.
At othertimes I get a lot of distortion and the sound jumps. Sometimes the distortion is a nasty squeaking - screeching noise, othertimes it is intermittant clicks, sometime regular, sometimes not.
It happens with Media Player, Real Player, Steinberg Clean and WavLab Lite amongst others, but sometimes it's OK with one and not with another.
I record vinyl records to CD and sometimes while I am recording I get the distortion - but its not there when I play back the file!

I'm at a loss to understand the problem, and haven't yet ventured into replacing the soundcard as I'm not sure I have the ability. (I'm OK with software installs, but I've never done any internal hardware installs).

The problem started last summer, but I'm not sure if it started after installing a game for my son (Delta Force/Armored Fist), or after the first of two power-supply unit failures, which all happened at around the same time. If the latter I suppose this could have damaged the card itself?

To try and fix it I updated the soundcard driver. I have a Soundblaster AudioPCI 128 Card which wasn't recognised by the creative labs automatic updater, so I had to try and locate the right one myself. Recently I have noticed two programs in the Add/Remove Programs listing - one for 'SoundBlaster AudioPCI 128' (which seems to be the earlier of the two) and one for 'Soundblaster PCI 128 Drivers' (dated October 2004). I thought this might be casuing a conflict, but device manager says my soundcard is working properly and I've run a check with drivershq which says the driver is good.

So, I don't know if I have a damaged sound card, whether I've installed the wrong driver or whether its something as simple as the speakers - though this last seems most unlikely.

I do hope someone can help me get this sorted.
Thank you,
Sharon

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Hi,

This is a tuff one but try uninstalling both drivers then reinstalling the latest one.

If you decide to replace the card I am sure we can guide you thru it.

Rick

[Doby]

Hi,

This is a tuff one but try uninstalling both drivers then reinstalling the latest one.

If you decide to replace the card I am sure we can guide you thru it.

Rick

[SharonMurray]

Hi Doby,

Thank you for your help. I'm sorry I've been so long in getting back to you, but I had a virus to clean up that was taking me all my time.

I uninstalled my card and both drivers as you suggested, but couldn't re-install the driver. In the end I used the original one on the CD and asked Soundblaster for some advice as to the right driver for my card. They've told me the right one, which I've downloaded, but I still can't install it. I keep getting an _ins5576.mp.exe error message. I think this is something to do with InstallShield, and might be the result of corruption following the virus.

Have you any ideas?

Thanks,
Sharon

[Doby]

Hi Sharon,

I can't be of much help but I did a google on that error and the only thing that comes up is forums with some guys talking about that error when they try to load games, there were not any solutions at least any good ones.

These "guys' were all running windows 2000 that were getting that error so I believe it is something with windows and not a bad card.

I would make sure you have all the latest MS updates and then try to install the driver and see if the error persists, other than that the only thing I know of would be to do a repair or clean install of 2000.

Rick