Network Kills Audio?
Fred, Love your newsletter. I started with the free edition and have been a Plus subscriber for several years. I had an experience a couple of months ago that may be of help to some of your readers. One of my friends got a new computer and wanted me to configure it so they could surf the Internet safely. The computer is a Compaq Presario, AMD Sempron 3000+, 256 DDR, 40GB HDD, CD-RW/DVD ROM, Phoenix/Award BIOS and has Windows XP Home. I installed the free Zone Alarm firewall, AVG anti-virus free edition and Hitman Pro 2. They were on a dialup connection, so since they were not using the Ethernet port I disabled it in the BIOS. Several days later they told me that the computer did not have any sound since I worked on it. I went back and found that when I went into Control Panel - Sound and Audio Devices, the Device Volume section was grayed out. After a lot of looking for the problem I ended up calling tech support. They talked me through about 15 minutes worth of things I already tried to no avail. Then they told me to reset the BIOS defaults. The sound came back as soon as I did this. Just so I knew for sure what caused the problem I went into the BIOS and disabled the Ethernet port again. The sound quit working. I enabled the Ethernet port and the sound came back. I should have tried resetting the BIOS before calling tech support but I knew the only thing I did in the BIOS was disable the Ethernet port. I could not see how that would effect the sound. Just goes to show that you should never take anything for granted, especially when it comes to computers. ---Dave Mantz
That is indeed a little strange, Dave. But I've seen something similar with built-in sound cards and modems; some systems use the same digital signal processing (DSP) chip for all audio, whether it's music or the voices and tones going over a phone line. Trying to disable one function in the BIOS would sometimes disable the other as well because the DSP chip would be turned off and unavailable. Perhaps that's the kind of thing you ran into, where two (or more) functions depend on one piece of multi-purpose hardware.
I suppose it also could be a problem with IRQs ("interrupt requests:" http://www.google.com/search?q=interrupt+request+irq ) but you said it's a new machine, and IRQ conflicts are quite rare in newer PCs.
In any case, thanks for the tip: Checking for unexpected dependencies in the BIOS is something to tuck away in the back of our minds for future troubleshooting.
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