One of my clients called in about having no sound. I checked the speakers plus all the connections and they were fine. I went into Control Panel => Sounds and picked one of the sounds to try to test, but the Play and Stop buttons are greyed out and can't be used no matter which sound I pick. Checked in Device Manager to make sure driver was there and it was. Driver had no conflicts with anything else, so I removed the sound driver and reloaded it. 98 reloaded sound driver fine except there were a couple of "extra" sound drivers that weren't installed when we first put Windows 98 on that computer. So I went into Add New Hardware to install these "extra" sound drivers and to my surprise there was no Win98 hardware list whatsoever. Whatever I picked video, sound, system devices, CD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, etc. everything was blank, manufacturers and models. The only way I could load any windows drivers was to unhide and manually browse to the INF directory and load the drivers that way. But the bad news is that when I reloaded all of the sound drivers the manual way it still didn't repair my no sound problem. I'm a little befuddled. Is there a way to restore the list and sound without having to reload 98? It wouldn't be so bad to reload 98 if the client I supported didn't have a $#%tload of programs installed. The PC is a Dell GX260 with integrated SoundMAX audio if that helps any.
Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations SkipVought on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
No sound and missing Hardware List problems In Win98
- Thread starter EvilEye
- Start date
ok, go into your control pannel > sounds and multimedia > click the "audio tab" check what the "preffered device is" is it your sound card?
if not, select it > apply > ok, try your sound.
also check the hardware tab to see if the audio codecs are there.. see how u go..
Luke
if not, select it > apply > ok, try your sound.
also check the hardware tab to see if the audio codecs are there.. see how u go..
Luke
- Thread starter
- #3
Okay I went into Multimedia => Audio tab and Playback is greyed out saying no device available. Recording, however, does have SoundMAX Audio Device. I know both should be reading SoundMAX, but Playback isn't. I also checked on the codecs and they are loaded properly. Just for s@#ts and giggles I went into the registry under Current_Users\Software\Microsoft\Multimedia (I think that's right) and Playback had no value, but Recording did. So I went ahead and typed in SoundMAX Audio Device just to see what would happen and rebooted. My entry didn't stick. I think Local_Machine overwrote my attempt to fix. I checked the MIDI tab and that's greyed out as well. Most likely because Playback has nothing in it. Anything else?
BuckeyeComputers
Technical User
possible have a corrupted codec.. make a list of them then delete or uninstall the reinstall them again(probally a good idea to uninstall sound card first)
- Status
