I don't know where to turn. I have assembled two identical PCs and Win98 installed both ESS chip sound cards just fine. The joystick port works fine and Win98 shows the card installed anbd responding. The only problem is that I can't get any sound out of the jack on the card. I have tried deleting and re-installing the hardware and software to no avail. I do not know the mfg. One note in the "User's Guide" states "NOTE: It is recommended to use ACTIVE SPEAKER in order to activate your sound card properly." I just do not know what that means or if its important. Help, Xmas is comming and the kids are looking foward to their new PCs.

Hi, Active speaker is a speaker with build-in amplifier. If your card not have power amplifier the sound will be very silent if you connect passive speaker (or headphones) to it, but nevetheless you will be able to hear it. I think you must check mixer settings. Double click on speaker icon in the Task Bar and make sure your volume controls are enabled and not set to zero. If you not have this little seaker in Task Bar it can result from not properly configured card. You not said what model of ESS you have, but most of them come with ESSCFG.exe utility. Run it from DOS box in Windows and see what actual setting your card have. Then in Device Manager make sure your card has the same settings and correct them if needed. Good luck, Igor M

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Hi! I just bought a new computer with a Sound Blaster Live! Value on. When I installed Windows 98, it detected my sound card and installed the drivers for this device. After that, I installed the drivers in the CD-ROM that came with my sound card, but it starts causing problems in my computer, displaying FATAL ERROR messages, then I downloaded from the Internet a file called sblw9x.exe that is supposed to contain the new drivers, that fixed my problem of error messages, but there's no sound, I thougth that it could be my speakers but I tried them in my old computer and they worked perfectly. It seems that my sound card works properly because when I test it with the Creative Diagnostics and it doesn't detect any error but there's NO SOUND!!! Could that be a hardware problem? HELP ME PLEASE!