PCA Forums

I have a creative labs 16 bit plug n play sound card. The card itself is fine. It was working until only recently. A few months ago I upgraded to windows 2000. It was working fine at first, but slowy it started to stop working. Sometimes the computer would freeze, I would reboot and there would be no sound. Other times there would just be no sound period. Now, I havent gotten it to work for a few weeks. I've tried everything. I played with the IRQ and DMA settings. Nothing. I reinstalled the drivers countless times and still nothing. Does anyone have any ideas? If I can't get this to work soon, I'm going back to windows 98....

Well, I went to creatives website and saw that there are no official drivers for the SB 16 ISA card. If this is the one you have, then this is probably why you are experiencing all these problembs. If you have a Soundblaster 16 PCI card, there might be hope. You can try downloading drivers from creatives website here:

http://www.soundblaster.com/support/drivers/

Sounds to me like the sound card is just dieing a slow death. Think it might be time for a little upgrade.

Yeah, sounds like a dying card here as well. All the older SB 16 cards have generic drivers in Win2K that should work fine.

If it was working before there's no reason it shouldn't work now.

Frankly, I'd buy one of those cheap C-media cards like these:
http://store.yahoo.com/directron/av5121.html
http://directron.com/av515m.html
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.a ... 611&DEPA=1

That first one for $12 is going so sound a lot better, and probably use less CPU cycles than that old SB16.

Any card built around a C-Media chip usually does a fine job. I've got a cheap one on the shelf here that sounds better than my SBLive.

It's not a Win2K issue as I also have 2 Win2K PCs here using that SB16 w/o any problems. The above options are worth looking into but don't go back to Win98

Well, the card itself works fine. I transferred it to my linux box just to test it and it worked like a charm. Put it back in the win2k machine and it says that device can't initialize. I have reinstalled the drivers several times and with no avail. Any other ideas???

This an ISA or PCI card? If it's PCI it may not be happy about sharing one IRQ with every other device (this is normal under Win2K). Have you tried it in a different slot?

The card is a PCI card. It was sharing an IRQ with the video card so I changed it over to another. It still will not initialize though. Do you think switching it to another slot will honestly make a difference?

Worth a shot, but I really can't understand why it's giving you so much trouble.