Sound issues.

[Poppa_Meth]

My girlfriend called me this morning complaining about sound problems with her PC. I've done some troubleshooting on the phone. I've ascertained that the speakers themselves work fine. I've also discovered that CD audo seems to work fine through WMP10. She has no system sounds though and no audio from Yahoo Messenger. Also she has a video game Alice installed in which the sound seems to work fine. I've tried a few things. The hardware is all listed as working fine. All volume controls are maxed and not muted. When she goes to control panels and the sounds setting, she can go to the tabe for windows sounds and while they are listed she gets nothing when clicking the play button to test them. She says it looks like the button being clicked and isn't just grayed out, but nothing plays. I tried to check a few other things as well. She has an nForce4 Ultra mobo from chaintech using onboard audio. Going to control panel>sound and audio devices>Hardware she highlights the nForce hardware and clicks properties. She has only a general and a driver tab. My Sound Blaster has a Properties tab and I'm not sure if this is normal for her onboard sound. Also if she highlights Audio codecs and clicks properties she only has two listings. One is Fraunhoffer and the other is another MS listing ( I forget the exact name). I have a whole list of codecs on mine.

One thing to note: Friday we tried to play an MP3 on her PC and we had to re-download the Fraunhoffer codec. For some reason it seems that it just disappeared. I've tried installing the WMP9 codec pack on it since this has happened but still nothing else is showing up in her codecs.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to try next. I will be down there saturday and may install the latest nForce audio drivers to see if that has any effect.

Any advice on what else to try is appreciated.

[ROF]

Sounds like an nForce driver issue. Since you don't list the board model I can't diagnose any further but trying to install the latest nVidia audio drivers would be a good start.

[Poppa_Meth]

CHAINTECH VNF4/Ultra Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

I'm not so sure it's an nForce issue. I believe it may be a codec issue. Here are the compression codecs my system lists.



Hers is apparently only listing one MS codec and then the Fraunhoffer codec, which I believe is only there because WMP downloaded it when she tried to play an MP3 friday. It seems her codecs may have gone missing for some reason. I'm not sure how to remedy that either, outside of downloading each one individually. I've tried installing the WMP9 codec pack to no avail.

I won't be able to get down there and look at it until Saturday so I'm trying to figure something out she can do herself in the meantime, but I'm running out of ideas.

Thanks for the help so far.

[Poppa_Meth]

I've tried reinstalling WMP with no luck. The codecs that are missing are the ones that install with XP SP2, the system codecs themselves. Is there any way to get these codecs back easily? I know in older versions of windows you could installed them via add/remove programs under the windows component section but that isn't the case with XP.