indiblu5

I just upgraded to windows 2000 professional from win 98. Since this upgrade, on my windows start up and on any music played i have huge screaching noises and music screeches and static.

thanks
indiblu5

Bartender

Are you absolutely sure the noise is coming from your speakers, not a fan or hard drive or optical drive?
If it's your speakers, the best thing I can think of is to install new drivers, especially since you upgraded from 98 to W2K. W2K isn't real strong with multimedia stuff, although it's got my vote as the best Windows OS overall. Do you have onboard sound or a discrete card like a Creative Soundblaster or whatever?
If you have onboard sound you need to find out the exact motherboard you're using, then visit their website, then find the sound drivers. Download them to your desktop, get offline, and install them. You may have to burn them to a CD. You may have to go into Device Manager and uninstall the sound, then restart the PC and it's going to recognize new device and ask whether you want to install drivers yourself or let Windows try to find them.
While you're at it I'd suggest getting all the drivers for that motherboard; chipset, audio, video, LAN, etc. and install all of them. If you do that and they're separate downloads, write down on a separate piece of paper each download and what it's for. Otherwise you'll forget what they are and wonder why it's not working when you're trying to feed your soundcard the LAN drivers. Make sure to download the drivers for W2K, or they might have drivers for "W2K/XP" as one bundle.
If you have a separate sound card it'll be easier to install drivers. Identify the card, go to their website, make sure you're getting the latest drivers for that card and your OS, download, install.

Either way, installing drivers can be awkward. Windows typically doesn't recognize the drivers until you stick its nose right in the file. For instance, I was trying to install some nVidia drivers the other day so that I could run 2 monitors. I had the right CD in the tray, but Windows didn't see the drivers until I directed it to the exact folder. This can be very frustrating. Unless you're pretty sure about what you're doing it's easy to assume that you have the wrong drivers. That's when the panic sets in and it's hard to think straight.

Sometimes downloaded drivers have to be extracted before Windows recognizes them, which adds to the confusion. Look around on the driver site for any "How to Install" directions. Also, if you Explore the downloaded driver package, sometimes you'll find a "readme" text file with directions.

Good luck