Sound Died

So, every now and then my "direct sound drivers" will crash. That's what the winamp error tells me, I can fix it in winamp, but not any other programs. I can't even get into the volume control when it happens. It says I have to install new audio mixer devices. So I reinstalled the drivers, and directx. Didn't work, that only fixed it when I rebooted.

It seemed to happen right after the style taskbar style thing would flash from XP style to windows classic for like a second, so I tried setting it to windows classic all the time, didn't work. I'm on windows xp and my soundcard is a piece of crap intigrated via'97 whatever. D:

Installing's not good enough, you need to uninstall the old one first too. Is this the latest version of DirectX you're installing too? Which output plugin are you using in Winamp, since that might be dodgy too.

Safest way to get a perfectly clean slate though is to reformat and reinstall :p

I did uninstall the old drivers first, and winamp's actually still working. It's the directx sound output plugin, if I just change the sound driver for that it'll be fine, but I can't do that for other programs like games, and the audio/video capture thing. So I don't think it was winamp that caused it, it just told me what the problem was, and yah it is the latest directx.

Would a uninstall/reinstall of just windows be good enough for this? ><

Have you updated the drivers? Also try downgrading Direct X to version 8 as 9 has had some problems with older and intigrated cards :D

It'd certainly be fast :p Except maybe the reinstalling of programs you use, but I doubt that can be that much for the average user :p

The other option is to force Windows to use different drivers for your sound card that you pick, that are still compatible with it, preferably signed drivers that came with Windows itself, since it does seem to be a driver problem.


EDIT: Also, the only safe way to downgrade DirectX is to reformat and reinstall, since it's so integrated with Windows :D

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Originally Posted by Farah

EDIT: Also, the only safe way to downgrade DirectX is to reformat and reinstall, since it's so integrated with Windows :D

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Or using the rollback Direct X function, but you know thats too easy to do, along with the rollback driver function and the find the problem and fix it, their all too easy, why not just format everying in thw rold, thats after spending 100 years backing up every computer and them another age reinstalling all the game/programs/etc and resetting them up so its how we like it, yeah why not...

If I was willing to change my sig, it'd be changed to "Reinstall Windows".

Waaaah, I don't have a disk though. They never gave us one when we bought it or something. @_@
But first! How would I force Windows to use different drivers for my sound card?

R.I.P.

I didn't know sound as a person, but I did know him/her as a sense. He/She was a usefull sense, inspiring fine art and sports..just about anything we do. He/She will truely be missed but we have to remeber one thing, he/she is in a better place.

Find the device in Device Manager, open it's Properties, and click the Change Drivers button and follow the instructions there :p