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intel intergrated soundmax

By RCOM ·
I've got a customer that has Win 98se with intel P4 board, 845 chipset and soundmax intergrated sound. He fired his original tech and so I've stepped into this mess after the fact.

The original problem was that the sound was choppy and an item in device manager was shown as unknown.

No problem right? Found the guy's intel disk and re-installed drivers. The unknown device turned out to be the pci bus manager. But the the sound quit working.

These devices share IRQ 9 with the nic.

The audio driver installs fine but doesn't work and isn't available as the "preferred playback device" under sound & multimedia devices (control panel). It's listed but is grayed out. But is available as preferred recording.

Tried various methods of installing the driver, including stopping the auto-detect and running the setup.

Downloaded latest drivers from intel.

Device manager shows only one listed item for the sound card "soundmax intergrated audio", I don't know if there should be mpu401.

If I try to open "Soundmax" which is the software included with the driver from control panel I get the following message, "An error occurred while Windows was working with the Control Panel file C:\Windows\System\SMAX3CP.CPL"

Removed all software and files associated to the audio

Removed and re-installed all Windows sound and multimedia files

Note:
For those of you that would suggest formatting the drive, please skip this question.

Thanksfor any help

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by tech_wiz03 In reply to intel intergrated soundma ...

win98 has bad habit of installing it's own default set of device drivers especially when dealing with on-board devices.

What i do is a clean install of windows, remove all device drivers for on-board related items then run the manufacturers install driver disk / or upgraded drivers then do the reboot and that removing drivers requests you do and this most of the time works to override win98 and force it to use the correct stuff.

hope this helps
rick

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by RCOM In reply to

Windows 98 doesn't have a built in driver for this audio device. Thanks

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by TheChas In reply to intel intergrated soundma ...

Okay, since you don't want to start over, you may need to take care of this the hard way.

Remove any related software from add / remove programs.

Remove the sound and related devices from device manager.

Re-start the PC and enter BIOS setup.

Disable the sound device.

Boot into Windows.

CAUTION: Improper use of regedit can create more problems than it fixes.
(The note is more for people browsing this forum.)

Run regedit.
Start at the enum key and delete any remaining sound related keys.
Keep a list of names in the keys.
Now, scroll back to the top of the registry and search on any names related to the sound device.
Delete keys as appropriate.

Run sysedit, and clear out any legacy calls to the sound device.

Finally, search the system folders for any related files and delete as needed.

Re-start, and enable the sound device.

Exit the driver wizard, and manually install the driver.

Chas

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by RCOM In reply to

Chas thanks for the wisdom. They need to include another choice besides accepting or rejecting answers. Usually and in the worse cases your suggestions would work. WhenI come to ask for assistance its usually way beyond the norm.

I've gone through what you've suggested and have done a few more things. I also look is in the shared dll's section of the registry to see what files the driver loaded. Make a list then rename or move the files before reinstalling.

OK, I've thought about this and I didn't verify if the CD provided by my customer is actually correct. He has 4 PCs so.... It's an Intel Disk and motherboard but I'm not sure.

If I let windows search the CD for drivers it says none are available but will accept the "soundmax intergrated driver" if chosen manually. Even though Windows will take it maybe this isn't the correct driver. I didn't have a chance to check further as in opening the case etc... This will be next.

If I run the software setup the drivers are accepted and seem to load fine. The driver was working before but again the busmanager wasn't correctly installed. Perhaps the bus manager is given a higher priority. I sure miss the days before plug and pray. It was so much easier to be able to set jumpers and have full control.

I'm real close to simply disabling this crap in the Bios then install a PCI sound card. This way I can get on with the rest of my life. Don't you just love all in one mother boards?

Again thanks, if any more thoughts on this please let me know.

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by Deadly Ernest In reply to intel intergrated soundma ...

If all the above fails, not sure how it could after the advice from Chas, then go to the device manager and set the pci bus manager to another IRQ (do the same for all the resources it is using) as an item of 'forced hardware' via manual settings. If this fails try doing the same for the sound card, sometimes you can't force system devices like the bus.

Forcing one or the other to another IRQ should relive the resource conflict and permit it to work.

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by RCOM In reply to

Unfortunaly the IRQ settings can't be changed for either of the devices. That would be cool. Thanks anyway.

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by RCOM In reply to intel intergrated soundma ...

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