[SLUG] Sound, a bit of progress 2

[Paul Teasdale]

On Wed, April 26, 2006 10:19, Stephen O'Neill wrote:
> Mike Bennett wrote:
>>
>> Hmm, I was under the impression that for onboard NICs, Windows picked
>> them up automagically. It certainly has with the last several machines
>> I can remember setting up.
>
> My machine uses the nforce 2 chipset and is a nearly 3 years old. My
> onboard NIC isn't picked up automagically... but then 3 years is old in
> this game!
>
Sorry about the late reply. Had a lovely trip out to sunny Slough to a
client with no desktop internet access (and the hotel was 20 pence per
minute for Internet access) so I've been offline for a few days.

Steve you are of course correct. Likewise one of my motherboards (a
Gigabyte with NForce4 chipset) has two ethernet ports, one NForce4 chipset
and one Marvell chipset, both of which needs drivers to work correctly
under Windows XP; they are not autmagically detected. The office has a
shed-load of Dells with Intel ethernet chipsets all of which needs drivers
installing before they will work. It cannot always be guaranteed that
Windows will automagically detect ethernet cards (or any hardware come to
that) especially if it is newer than the operating system (or unusual in
some respect).

John, before you uninstall Windows take a look in device manager
(Right-click My Computer, select Manage, now select the Device Manager
node). You will most likely see some hardware descriptions with a yellow
exclamation at the side of them. This is hardware that Windows has spotted
but is not working correctly because the appropriate drivers are not
installed. Look for something that says Audio Device (or similar; may be
Multimedia Controller). If this exists then Windows has spotted your
soundcard and I would bet you a tenner that installing the correct driver
will make it work. While you're there look for something like Ethernet
Controller. If you see that then this will be your ethernet card that
Windows has spotted. Install the drivers and that will work too. Likewise
Communications Controller is usually a modem and so on. I should point out
that it usually doesn't give you the exact names of the hardware because
although it has spotted them it doesn't truly know what they are until the
drivers are installed so don't expect to see something like NForce4
Multimedia Audio Device.

In my experience it's always easy to say the hardware is faulty but in 99%
of cases it usually isn't. Drivers and/or configurations issues are always
a more likely the cause of the problem. That said you (Lucy) may have just
been unlucky and the hardware is genuinely faulty.

Good luck!

Regards,
Paul.