SoundBlaster Live Crashing Windows 98

[karl101 0]

Hi

Today i decided to clean my pc , it was very dirty inside. so i took pc to garage and switched on air compressor and voila inside looks nice new now .

 

during the cleaning i removed sound card from PCI Slot 3 to PCI Slot 4 due to the fact that the hole where the screw fits to hold the sound card was a bit bigger and the sound card wouldnt be tight well to the case .

 

I then switched on pc and nothing came up on screen , i then rememberd that this sound card Sound Blaster Live CT4830 works only on PCI # 3 .

 

So i put it back on #3 and pc switched on normally but when it comes in the area where i shall enter my network password pc will just FREEZE . I booted into safe mode , removed all sound card drivers and when it rebooted it was finding sound card driver and hanged again when it found PCI Express .

 

For now i removed sound card and pc is working fine .. anyone knows why it used to work fine before when it was installed on PCI#3 and after i cleaned and installed on PCI#4 and back to PCI#3 PC started to freeze ?

[Sampson 0]

Your post is a little confusing since you are using Windows 98 on a system that has PCI Express rails? Do you really have PCI Express slots or is it just PCI?

 

In any event, if it is windows 98, it has reassigned your sound card to an IRQ that is shared with another piece of hardware that is hogging the IRQ or that the sound card doesn't play well with. Generally, under windows 98 the advice was always to move the card to a different slot and hope that it would grab a different IRQ. Make sure the card is seated properly. To be sure that it is making contact you can use a pencil eraser to "clean" the metal along the bottom of the card that fits into the slot to reduce the "corrosion". (You just have to swipe it lightly.)

 

Anyway, go onto Creative's website and download the latest drivers for your specific card for windows 98. You said that you already uninstalled your previous hardware - by that I am assuming that you uninstalled the software from Add/Remove software and you went into your System manager (task manager) and uninstalled the hardware itself from the hardware abstraction layer. If this is what you have done, normally, 98 will tell you that it has found new hardware and want to install the software for it. If it doesn't, then you can go into Add Hardware from your Control Panel and have Windows find the card. When it finds it, it will probably want to install a Windows driver for it, but don't let it. At this point you can continue by telling it the type of card you have (choose it from the drop downs, and indicate you have your own software. (This does not always work since 98 will probably start looking for an inf file and what you've downloaded is more probably an .exe file). Or, you can cancel, then bring up windows explorer and double click on the file you downloaded from Creative and install the drivers for the soundcard. Follow the prompts for the software and test the card with the software provided by Creative.