Take that, Turtle Beach!
posted on august 20, 2003, tag: tech
I finally managed to fix my soundcard problems yesterday. About four months ago, when our building's power went out due to a screwed up powerline under the street, my soundcard blew out. Or at least it seemed to.
Once we had power the next day I restarted my P4 tower only to find Winamp erring on playback. No wave output device. That's funny, I thought. I tried to reinstall the drivers, which ended up taking about two hours since I couldn't find the CD and had to download them from the Turtle Beach website. They were 25 MB, and it took a long time over dial-up. Once I finally downloaded them and installed, the sound still didn't work.
I wasn't really that eager to deal with the problem, so I gave up after a few uninstall/reinstalls, and enabled the built-in audio device on my motherboard. It stinks, though, and so my PC has been silent for the past 4 months.
Yesterday, I really wanted to play a game. I bought a really great video card a few months before moving, and I suddenly had the urge—now that I have a cable modem again—to play Counter-Strike. But you can't play games without sound, so I decided I would fix it, no matter what.
I'd forgotten how fixing things on a PC can be. It's rough. But, here's a rule of thumb that I always remember and that almost always works (unless your device is actually broken):
Uninstall the device completely—drivers, card (from the device manager), software associated—and shutdown (don't restart... shutdown all the way). Remove the card from the PCI slot. Reboot. Now your computer should behave as if it never had the device (this does not work for video cards, obviously, unless you have a built-in video card on your mobo). Shut the computer down again.
Reinsert the PCI card into a different slot if possible, and start the machine back up. Now reinstall drivers and software. Try to install the same drivers you had when the device was working, if possible—don't always opt for the newest drivers available online. If it was working once, chances are (unless it's broken), it will work again with those same drivers.
After you install the drivers, it's a good idea to restart again, although it might not be necessary. If your device isn't broken, chances are, it's working again.
I know that advice is probably well-known to a lot of you, but even if one person benefits from it, it's worth posting. Using that method has helped me out a lot in the past 8 years.
Now I can finally put my P4 to use again.
Comments
There are 3 comments, comments are closed
Ryan Powers on 08/20/2003:
Yeah, definetely a good process for troubleshooting problems.
Anyway, can you tell the differece between your turtle beach card's sounds and the integrated audio (on the mobo)? I never was convinced that I needed a seperate card. Not because I made any tests, just beceause I assumed that without top of the line speakers it wouldn't matter.
I have stero speakers with a mini powered sub. Do you think the sound quality would improve with a seperate card? Course I may not have to worry about it much longer anyway:)
Brice on 08/20/2003:
I had a horrible experience with a Turtle Beach card that I got one time with a Dell desktop a little over four years ago. It annoyed the hell out of me that that damn thing never got updated. The drivers were only supplied via Dell, but Dell never did release any drivers. In the end I was stuck with generic Windows 2000 drivers for a shitty card and I couldn't take advantage of the "advanced" features that the card was supposed to be able to support.
Beyond that, I was espeically annoyed because of all of the cards based on the Vortex core (I think that's what it was), this particular Dell card was the only one that didn't work with the company's supplied linux drivers. Such a pain in the ass.
Since then I've avoided anything to do with Turtle Beach. I have a Sound Blaster Live now and I've had no trouble with it what so ever.
demonpixel on 12/04/2004:
I know this archive is kind of old, but in case anyone is going to read it, I just wanted to let you know that whoever posted "Take that, Turtle Beach," was a huge help to me. I came to this page searching for help on Turtle Beach's Video Advantage, which is also a PCI based system. There was extremely limited help on their website, and I did what you said about a complete uninstall, switching to a different PCI slot, and reinstalling the drivers. AND IT WORKED. I just wanted to let you know that your solution was the only one that worked, and to thank you for sharing.