At 02:30 PM 3/21/2002, Howard Rubin wrote:
>My TEKRAM motherboard died last week and I replaced it with a 6VBA-133 from
>SOYO (newest bios update).  I dual boot WIN98SE and WINXP Home using a 20
>and a 8 gig drive, PII-350 and 256mb ram.  I have a RIVA TNT2 32mb Video,
>Colorado 5gb IDE tape Backup and a Creative CD and CD-RW drive.  The only
>other device plugged into the board besides the Video is a old SB16 ISA card
>with a IDE interface.  With my old board everything worked fine, with this
>one, the device manager in WinXP says everything is ok, but I get no sound.
>I delete all or some of the sound devices and redetect, it finds everything
>and the sound pops on, only till I reboot and have to do the same process
>over again.  The IDE interface is always ok.  The check mark is checked to
>show the icon on the tool bar, but this never appears.  My Windows 98 is
>fine, no problems at all!  When I installed the board, Windows 98 found
>everything and is faster than ever thanks to the new DMA 66 interface, but
>XP, I had to reinstall with the repair option.  I have reinstalled it twice
>again now to fix this sound problem.  Any suggestions from anyone other than
>buying a new card?  Did I miss something?  Thanks!

One of the catch-22 issues with WindowsXP and a SB16 card is the assignment
of IRQs to your sound card.  WindowsXP does not work all that well with
legacy devices such as ISA cards and assigns them just any available IRQ,
such as IRQ 9, 10, 4 or what ever works for WindowsXP.  The sad part is
that SB16 cards require IRQ5 for best performance and will work with IRQ7,
though not as well.  Any other IRQ and the SB16 card begins to work erratically
or not at all.  You can spend a great deal of time reassigning IRQs and solve
the issue by setting the SB16 card to IRQ5...  but, it is a real test of your
Windows skills to solve this issue.

My best advice is to opt for a new PCI Plug & Play audio card.  A low end card can
be had for as little as $10 and they will work with WindowsXP problem
free, (if they are not too off brand).

    Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group
http://nospin.com

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