What can garbled startup tone mean?

[gregrocker]

I have garbled start-up music (the tones played when Vista logo shows on
startup) about 3/4 of the time I start-up. A friend says it can mean corrupt
start-up but I ran the start-up repair and it shows nothing. Is it possible
to repair the file, or is this something that needs further troubleshooting?
Thanks.

 

[gregrocker]

I actually have nothing checked right now in my msconfig start-up tab. I did
a clean reinstall a few weeks back and the eMachines tech told me I could
uncheck everything because anything like the OS, my AVG, or driver-related
which needed to load would load itself. (see my post below 1/18 asking about
this) This seems to work as I have no performance related issues except my
Yahoo Widgets wouldn't load so I went ahead and checked them. There are a
few Windows functions listed in the Defender Software Explorer Start-up, but
right now I can't say that overloaded Start Up could be my problem with
having the Start-up tone garbled. Maybe it is something I unchecked?

 

[gregrocker]

I tried your suggestion below and restarted to safe mode but there is no
sound at all, which I think is standard for safe mode. Went ahead and ticked
msconfig's Normal Startup and restarted with all dozen boxes checked and
the sound is still garbled. So I unchecked all the boxes again and restarted
with the sound again garbled - no difference. Any other ideas?

 

[Eric]

During the Windows Vista sound chime, there shouldn't be any other
applications and services running.

I believe your issue might be driver related, as drivers are loading at the
time the vista logo and chime comes up. Make sure you have all the latest
sound, video and motherboard drivers.

The other option could be having too many devices on the same hardware
interrupt level. You may want to look at your device manager and check the
resource tabs for your video, sound and I/O cards. If you notice two or more
cards have the same IRQ level, then change one of them, and restart.

Also, check your CMOS to make sure you are taking advantage of multiple
CPU's if you have them, CPU cache, Direct Memory Access.

If you are overclocking your CPU, then disable this, sometimes overclocking
causes performance degradation. If you don't know what this means, then
disregard this.


Last option, reimage your machine (backup your files, then use the recovery
CD and wipe our your hard disk and start over with a new Vista install.)