Hi, I have the following problem with my system. Please help me if you know the solution. I have an assembled PC. It was working perfectly till last week. I have 2 OS win98 & win2000 Suddenly i find that my system's sound is gone. In both the OS I am unable to find the volume icon in system tray and the option to enable it in the sound properties have been grayed means i cannot enable it manually. Whenever i tried to play something the application s/w ( i have winamp, windows media player and real player) told some other application is using it which was not the case. When i looked in windows help it said one reason could be system resources may be low. but again my task manager showed that memory usage was 3 % and cpu was also working for a minimum. As this was the case i thought problem is with h/w. This what i have done 1. I was in win 98. I ran system file checker. I found lot of files changed. I restored everything. Suddenly i found that all the application s/w are playing my files but again i cannot hear sound nor did the sound icon reappear. 2. I tried to reinstall device driver software. It gave an error saying first enable the AC 97 card in bios. I went to BIOS and there it was shown as enabled. 3. I thought dust may be a reason and asked a professional maintenance person to take my sound card out and after cleaning put it back. But he is telling me that is not the problem and told me he need to take away my system to his place and wanted to do something else. Is he right? what can i do? is it s/w or h/w problem. Is there anything else that if i do will bring the system to its normal state. Thanks in advance regards seelu go on, when progress seems futile!never give in for there is no life after this

Reseat the card in the same or another slot, boot up and see if plug and play finds it or you can check device manager and see if it is there. Usually when it is greyed out it means the system is not seeing it or drivers are not available for it. Also, see if there is a question mark by your sound controller in device manager.

Try using the latest available drivers for your sound card, my friend had a problem just like yours with a onboard sound and i was able to fix it only with the new drivers... GooD LucK! It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice...

What is the state of your sound card in device manager?

Hi, i will try to reinstall the latest drivers from net. Device manager and the sounds and multimedia icon in control panel indicates nothing is amiss. I haven't taken out my sound card yet as i haven't done that kind of work.please tell me once i open the case how do i find which one is sound card. is it ok just to pull it up and then push it to the slot again Thanks seelu go on, when progress seems futile!never give in for there is no life after this

My system a P3 750MHZ came with the AC97 intergrated (onboard) sound. Right out of the box I started having problems with the sound .I would have sound sometimes and no sound most of the time. I was on the phone with tech support almost on a daily basis. They would have me check settings and try a little of this and that. After a reboot the sound would work ,so we would think the problem was solved ,wrong, next bootup no sound again. I finally had to decide if I wanted to box the system up and send it back ,or install a PCI sound card. I decided on the sound card ,which did not cost much more then the shipping charges would have been, I installed a Diamond sound card and never looked back .I have read many post from others having probs with AC97 intergrated sound. Good Luck Nick

Hi ghimpe, Can u tell me from where you got the driver s/w from. I got a CD with device driver for my Ac 97 card from intel.( I have an assembled PC with intel pentium4 processor) I couldn't find anything in the intel site. I downloaded 82801DB_DBM_DA_AC97.zip from driverguide.com. Is it OK. it has got only two files in it. one .inf and one .sys file. what do i do with it? open from a command prompt? Please comment. Thanks Seelu go on, when progress seems futile!never give in for there is no life after this