Sound Card issues

Hey guys.

A friend of mine told me a few months ago he had a brown out which fried his external modem.
At the same time his sound stopped working, he told me that he had been told he needs a new sound card. So I ordered him a sound card and went to install it today.
It's a Turtle beach card, $35 middle of the road 5.1, plenty good enough for what he wanted. I fitted the card and went through the motions. The software opened and I started the sound test to find no sound.
Checked and double checked all connections.

In Hardware list "Microsoft UAA Bus HD Audio driver was flagged as not working properly. Tried to install what I could find but to no avail.
Restarted PC and realised the new sound card was not recognised, so I switched it to a different PCI slot. Long story short I tried all slots and all connection possibilities.

Now, my question is.......

How likely is it that the surge in power durin the brown out that fried his modem also fried the onboard sound chip and the PCI bus/slots but left the onboard ethernet intact?

This is the only thing I can think of.

Although the Microsoft UAA bus HD Audio driver is still flagged but I'm thinking it only affects the HD audio and I'm thinking you should still get sound whether the UAA is working or not.

The machine is a 4 year old Dell complete package, forgot to look which one but has a PD 3.4 (ish) with 1gb ram and is running XP SP3 fully updated.

Any ideas would be apreciated because this guy is a really good guy who knows nothing about puters and I would really like to help him out, he only uses the PC for listening to music and doing his invoices on.

 

Well if I was in your shoes the first thing I would try would be to see whether another pci card is detected ie try an ethernet/nic card or tv tuner card. Just to test and see if windows auto detects the card (if you see what I mean).

Good Luck

 

Power surges and ebbs can do odd things to electronics. Things I would try include:

When you say you "went through the motions" I assume you disabled the onboard sound in the BIOS? You might also check for other settings in the BIOS that are sound related.

Have you tried to reinstall the driver for the UAA Bus HD audio? This Microsoft article discusses the newer version of the driver:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888111


Also, check the services and make sure the Windows Audio service is present, running, and set to Automatic.

It's a bit disconcerting that the sound card was not "found" by the operating system no matter what the BIOS setting are, though. Have you tried to manually install the card via Add/Remove Hardware?