no external sound HELP!!

Hello,

I have been trying for a couple of days to fix my sound. It disappeared for no apparent reason. I have a RealTek97 driver and WinXP. I downloaded a new copy of the drivers from this site yesterday and nothing, I added a drivers=mmsystem.dll to my system.ini boot sequence, which is something I copied from another forum that I read, not something I know from myself (that exceeds my computer knowledge-I am not usually quick to add computer language into DOS since I am not literate but I am feeling desperate!) I have system sounds, but just not external speaker sounds. I have checked the speakers and they are functional. There are no hardware conflicts or any errors in device manager. Any suggestions as to what I can try next??

Michelle

 

Hi,

Laptop or desktop? What "system sounds" do you hear? What I call "system sounds" would be the .wav (musical) sounds you hear when clicking a link, starting up and shutting down. Are these the sounds you are hearing or just a generic beep from the motherboard?

If you are hearing .wav sounds then the problem is most likely in your volume control with something being muted not a driver problem.

What type of media are you trying to play that won't give you any sound--CD or youtube video etc.?

 

I have a couple of games, like Mah Jong that beep when you choose tiles that are incompatible--and that is the type of system sound that I can hear. I refer to it as a system sound because it comes from the motherboard, but after your question I have done more investigating and I do not hear any Windows XP beeps that would normally come from the motherboard. This is a desktop computer.

I must confess at this point that we had trouble with our computer awhile back and a friend of ours who worked at a community college "fixed" it for us by overwriting the operating system with a college copy of XP. Genuine Advantage, for quite some time now, has been screaming that this is being recognized by Microsoft as an unauthorized copy of XP. I am expecting at some point for my whole system to go down, as I cannot get any updates and Microsoft will slowly dismantle my computer, but my computer is just old enough to make a harware upgrade a better idea than a software alone upgrade, so the plan is to keep fixing what we can till it crashes and then get a new system for our main computer (maybe put Linux on this one or something) Do you have any ideas on other things it could be or do you think perhaps it is related to the demise of my OS?