The Amazing Disappearing Sound Card

For a couple of weeks I've been struggling to install sound cards in a pair of customer computers running Windows XP, and it's been maddening. Installed some no-name sound cards, they install and configure OK, sound great... until the next reboot. After reboot, the hardware shows as present and working correctly, but the Sounds control panel says "No Audio Hardware". WTF?

Moved the cards around, reinstalled: same thing, every time.

Picked up a couple of name-brand Creative sound cards: same thing, every time.

Googled for hours: nothing.

This customer is a 30-minute drive for me, and no way I can bill them for all of this time I'm burning.

Finally figured it out: many moons ago, I'd gone through these machines and disabled a bunch of Services in the Control Panel for things that we didn't use, and this included the "Windows Audio" service which I had set to "Manual".

Apparently, installing the driver starts the service, but it doesn't notice that it's not set for Automatic Start, so upon reboot the device just disappears. Every time. Simply setting this service to start automatically fixed the problem.

Posted by Steve at July 06, 2003 04:35 PM | TrackBack