[cm1983]

Greetings! New user to this forum but I have been lurking a fair while - just so happens that I need some help now

[Backing Story] Last week had a problem with my CPU overheating a great deal. No biggie... last night I get around to reapplying thermal paste and everything is great - back to normal. I load up a game and *BAM* - everything freezes and sound takes a dump on me.

No problem so I think...

[Problem]... I reload Windows as per normal (XP SP3), and all of a sudden my Creative Soundcard is missing in Device Manager. Alright, that's not good. I reseat the card into a different PCI slot and reboot. Everything installs correctly and I think I'm fine. Right? Wrong.

I go into Winamp to play music and nothing. I head into the 'preferences' tab to re-select my soundcard and it shows up there, however I notice in a box beneath that it reads:

"error getting device info
(device in use ?)"

When clearly the device is NOT in use. I then go to play music and:

"Bad DirectSound driver. Please install proper drivers or select another device in configuration. Error code: 80004005"

But the drivers ARE correct. Better yet I head into Ventrilo and get these messages when I try to setup my mic/headset:

(when clicking on 'Monitor') - "CreateCaptureBuffer failed. HR=E_FAIL. An undetermined error occurred". I also get the same thing when clicking on 'Test'. I also get this list of errors when I close the setup to get back into Vent's GUI:

"Unable to activate DirectSound for selected device.
DirectSoundCaptureCreate failed. HR=DSERR_NODRIVER. No sound driver is available for use"

"Failed to open input device. Another program might have it open already. rc = -10"

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I stress the following things:

1. I've tried reinstalling the card, with different sets of drivers even and still nothing.
2. I've tried disabling the onboard sound through BIOS thinking there was a conflict (I did this when my sound was working previously without worry - no idea why it would be any different now but I did it anyway).
3. Everything appears to be installed OK through Device Manager. No conflicts. No exclamation marks. No disabled or "have to restart first" types of messages.
4. Everything was working absolutely fine before the crash last night.
5. I have nothing else that could possibly be open for there to result in the "another program might have opened it already" line relating to Input Device.

I'm really stumped as to what's going on because everything appears to be working absolutely right - except there's no sound.

 

[efx8]

Welcome to the forum.

Have you checked in Control Panel > Sound > Audio > Your sound card is the preferred device in each tab?

Also it's worth running a full anti-virus and anti-malware scan on your PC.

 

[cm1983]

I have everything as preferred device and what-not... it really looks as though everything just doesn't want to work even though it's giving every indication it should. For what it's worth I just enabled by AC97 again but when I plug the speakers/headphones in the resulting sound is EXTREMELY suffocated. Barely audible even with everything turned all the way up both through Volume Control and physically on the speakers.

I don't know if that's an indication of anything else or of any help.

 

[cm1983]

In the latest of what I've tried, restarted/reinstalled for the umpteenth time. When I go into sound properties I can actually hear myself loud and clear through my speakers via my own microphone (you know how you can mute your mic or leave it on so you can hear yourself? Yeah, that).

So I can hear me when I speak to myself through my speakers... but Winamp refuses to play music. Ventrilo will simply crash if I don't have the 'Mute Sound' checkbox ticked... and I'm still kind of square one at this stage.

Really considering doing a fresh install of XP.

 

[cm1983]

Update: Found an old SB Live soundcard around the house and replaced it out. Case closed. Old Creative must have completely died out on me last night altogether... still don't know why I was able to hear myself through the mic.

 

[WereBo]

Hi cm1983 and welcome to TSF :wave:

Glad you found the cure, all I can suggest about what went wrong, is that it depends on which part of the old AC97 sound-chip died