My friend has a Tyan 1590S MOBO with an AMD K6 II 400MHz CPU and 512MB SDRAM. Her OS is WIN95B. She recently purchased new powered speakers and noticed a lot of “static” and distortion from them. This may have been there before with the old speakers but they were of such poor quality that she wasn’t sure. The sound card was an old ESS ISA. It had an IDE connector for the CD-ROM. Her CDRW was attached to it. It seemed to be seated properly. I pulled it and reseated it. Now, the OS no longer recognizes the sound card. The CDRW will only be recognized during boot if it is attached to the IDE connection on the MOBO. It will not be seen if attached to the IDE connection on the soundcard. So, I’m thinking this must be an old sound that was getting ready to die and now it is dead. I purchased a new sound card and was going to take it over to my friend’s house when she called me to tell me more bad news. She tells me that her PCI modem has stopped working. It was working after we messed around with her sound card. Now she gets a message when she tried to dial out that says that it is not working and she should turn in on or unplug and replug it. She pulled it from the MOBO and reseated it. That didn’t help. She also tried to uninstall and reinstall it and still no go. She ran a virus scan and found a virus called JS Seeker.B. I went to the Symantec website and this seems like a pretty benign virus. I didn’t see any reference to it’s messing up your hard ware. We followed the steps that Symantec suggested for its removal and still: no sound card, no modem. I realize this POST contains at least three different problems but I thought if I presented them all, perhaps someone reading might be able to give me direction to resolve these issues. In advance, thanks!

Re; Sound card/CD. An IDE CD will not run on a sound card CD connector. That is a proprietary connection. Different drivers (& drives for that matter), and they must be loaded via config.sys before windows loads for the proprietary CD to be "seen" by windows. On an IDE CD, only the four conductor sound cable should go to the sound card.

Dan Penny: Thanks for writing back but you are wrong about the IDE issue with this sound card. I believe that this is a very old ISA sound card. It probably was originally in a computer that had a 486 CPU in it. MOBOs back then may not have had IDE connections! CD-ROMs and HDDs connected to the MOBO through ISA cards that had IDE connectors, kind of like the PCI/IDE adapters that are available today for enhancing the IDE ATA. Before things stopped working, the CDRW was connected to the IDE connection of this sound card and had been functioning well for more than a year. BRIAN