The speaker icon that sits in the system tray next to the time display has disappeared from my Windows 98 system. How can I recover this icon? I use it to access the volume control panel. (more…)

The sound on my computer will only work every second time I boot up. There are no error messages and the settings are correct. I am running a Gateway 1 GHz PC with Windows ME and Boston Speakers. (more…)

When playing audio on my computer the audio stream stops and starts quite often. This happens whether coming off the Net (radio feeds) or off the hard drive. It doesn’t matter which media player I use it still happens. Reinstalling the audio drivers from the system CD makes no difference. How can I stop these interruptions and have a continuous unbroken audio stream? (more…)

My problem concerns a Crystal Semiconductor Corp. ISA sound card with a CS4235 Cirrus Logic chip. I have transplanted the card from a 486 Windows 95 machine (where it worked OK) to a Pentium 233 MHz Windows 98 box. The installation of the drivers for the card appeared to be successful using the Windows 98 version of the installation program supplied on the disk. However, after rebooting the computer all the audio devices (being Crystal WDM Audio Codec; Crystal WDM Audio Control Registers; and Crystal WDM MPU401-Compatible Crystal PnP Game Port) go missing from the Device Manager. So every time I start up the computer I have to go through the entire installation procedure again. How can I get Windows 98 to recognise the sound card and its drivers at boot-up? The ‘Device=’ statements for the sound card are in the CONFIG.SYS file and the files specified in those statements are still in the C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32DRIVERS directory. So I don’t understand why they won’t load. A book I have on Windows 98 warns that Windows 98 does not take kindly to ISA cards. However, I don’t want to buy a PCI card as I only need sound for the occasional encyclopaedia CD-ROM or audio CD. Hope this makes sense to you and that you can suggest a solution. (more…)

Recently, I did a complete reinstall of Windows 98 SE. Now I cannot play sound files and I am getting numerous error messages in DXDIAG. After downloading the latest versions of the ‘SB16.vxd’ driver and DirectX, things are not much better. At best I get patchy sound with Windows Media Player and with games even though they had not misbehaved before. I recently added a microphone and that won’t record. Maybe this is the culprit? I can still play audio CDs and run FM radio and Pixelview TV with sound (I don’t load them all at once). Would reverting back to an earlier version of DirectX fix the problem? Any suggestions? (more…)