Sound Not Working - Need Driver or What?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nehmo Sergheyev
  • Start date Start date
No-one has asked the obvious - "What in Hades were you doing with tea
anywhere near the internals of your computer?!"

You might not get much sympathy if you say it was beer? <g>

Geo
 
- Cerridwen -
"What in Hades were you doing with tea
anywhere near the internals of your computer?!"

- Nehmo -
After a few years of faithful service, including surviving a house fire,
my machine, a 533 MHz e-Machine mini-tower, pleaded with me for a larger
hard drive. She was so full, she was having trouble defragging herself,
and there was nothing left that I could bear to delete. So I got an 80
GB and installed it, but it took me about a week:
http://snipurl.com/47pn . Since I had been unplugging and replugging so
much, I had left the wrap-over cover off for convenience.

To celebrate the added space, I downloaded a movie. My wife and I then
prepared to watch the movie by making some tea. I'm a little unorthodox
in tea consumption in that I don't always have my tea the same way, and
on this occasion, I loaded my mixture with sugar and creamer; this made
for a high ion concentration, and consequently, a high electrolyte
conductance. .

As a precautionary measure just prior to watching the movie, I went to
move the cordless mouse away from the edge of the table to a more secure
position. But I was already holding something in my left hand, so I
reached with my right, my usual mouse hand, for the operation. But my
right was just as preoccupied as my left. I also was holding my
sugar-cream tea with my right. I tilted the cup when I reached for the
mouse, and the tea poured down both sides of the m'board.

After much experimentation and attempts to fix, both by myself and a by
knowledgeable friend who had just recently been fired from Sprint, we
determined the m'board, and all three drives were destroyed. Spraying
with cleaner didn't help. But it so happened that my friend owed me a
computer or something like that for an electrical repair I had done to
his house. He gave me a "new" box and board, also a 533, and I installed
my original 15 GB hard drive.

More than you wanted to know probably.
 
I didn't know that. I've only had experience with a couple of boards
(that didn't have separate sound cards), and both used regular
non-amplified speakers.

Do as the other guys suggest and get amplified speakers.
Go to a computer store and ask for 'computer speakers'. They'll know what
you mean!
NO soundcard nor motherboard available today nor even in the last five years
to my knowledge, has enough power to drive speakers.

The last soundcard I had with an amplified output was the SB16 ISA - this
was about ten years ago, so your old sound cards would be just as ancient.
 
Do as the other guys suggest and get amplified speakers.
Go to a computer store and ask for 'computer speakers'. They'll know what
you mean!
NO soundcard nor motherboard available today nor even in the last five years
to my knowledge, has enough power to drive speakers.

The last soundcard I had with an amplified output was the SB16 ISA - this
was about ten years ago, so your old sound cards would be just as ancient.

There was one card I'm aware of, the last that had onboard amp was a
Creative Labs SB128, though the amp was optional. The PCB was
designed to accomodate it but some cards omitted it. Looked like
this:
http://69.36.189.159/usr_1034/sb128amp.jpg
 
As far as the "why" goes, audio quality was improved by eliminating
the on-board amplification. The on-board amps of the past were cheap
and noisy. This may have not been a necessity, but it was the fact,
and there probably are real issues behind it.

-Dave
(e-mail address removed)
 
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