Hi. I'm really stuck. If anyone out there has had their share of headaches with the above model computer and has learned a thing or two, I'd appreciate any help.

I recently installed a new PCI sound card (Creative Labs 16 PCI) into this PC, and since then the whole system freezes up whenever an attempt is made to connect to the Internet. I wonder if this is a matter of the onboard audio conflicting with the new card. I have gone into the BIOS settings to try and disable the onboard sound, but it only allows for the option of changing the IRQ, not actually disabling it. Does anyone know how to do this?

Anyway, I'm not even sure that is the problem. This is a Compaq Presario 5000 with a reformatted hard drive and recent install of Win 98. So none of the original Compaq stuff is on there. All went well with that except for, in the hardware devices section, the PCI Bus Management drivers are not installed (I searched, but couldn't find ones that work). I disabled that device in the hardware profile, so it would stop prompting me to install the drivers on each bootup.

As it is, to be able to use the modem, I must disable the new sound card. Or to use the new sound card (which works fine otherwise), I must avoid trying to get online. Please help if you can. Thanks :)

My guess is that without the PCI Bus Management working you are getting an IRQ conflict. I would try some more to find the drivers for that.

i had a compaq presario 5000.. even with the 750 mhz. processor... what a nightmare.. i honestly don't know how it got past the testing stage of development.

anways: try a different pci slot to try to manually change the irq.. it does sound like the sound card and the modem are on the same irq which is causing the system to lock up when there being used at once.

Hi. Thanks for your advice. I checked the IRQ settings in BIOS, and these are where they stand right now:

(Onboard) VGA Controller: IRQ 3
(Onboard) USB Controller: IRQ 11
(Onboard) SMBus: IRQ 5
(Onboard) Audio Device: IRQ 5
(Slot 1) Audio Device: IRQ 3
(Slot 3) Modem: IRQ 11

IRQ settings can only be changed to a choice of those 3 numbers. I changed the sound card around to a couple different slots, but no change in the issue.

Yeah, dj, these computers are just awful. They seem to have gone out of their way to make sure you couldn't change or upgrade anything. What's more, this is a friend's PC, which I've repeatedly had to try and fix, and most of the time end up looking like an idiot. I just haven't run into the same problems with other PCs that I have with this model.

I e-mailed Compaq (now HP) and they got back to me within an hour with lonnnnng directions on how to disable the onboard audio. Going to try that within the next few days, though I don't have high hopes. This seems to definitely be a sound card/modem conflict.

Thanks again.