Sound Cards for Windows

Sound cards for Windows can be a pain in the butt sometimes. I set up this computer, really nice mother board, dual boot system, almost all free computer parts from friends. Can't beat that. Or so I thought.

My son began playing this make-your-own-music-on-the-internet game and the sound card for windows wouldn't work. What?! Well, I typically use Linux on this computer, so I had never tested the sound from the Windows side. I knew that all the sound drivers looked good (see first photo) so I was sure it worked. It didn't.

So what is the procedure for figuring out how to fix your sound cards for windows? After some trial an error I've come up with a process that has rarely steered me wrong. If you ever encounter sound problems with your sound cards for Windows XP system, I hope this helps you.

1. Check to make sure your drivers are good (see first picture). As I mentioned above, I checked this first. Go to Start>Control Panel, then on the left hand side click "Switch to Classic View." Then click on Administrative Tools>Computer Management> then, in the column on the left hand side, click on Device Manager. On your right hand side you'll see a list of all devices that you have in your system. See "Sound, Video and Games Controller?" Click on the little "plus" symbol to open those up.

If you see anything with a red "x" on it, then your driver for that device is bad. Right click on it, then click on "Update Driver" and it should take you through the steps. Allow it to use your internet connection to find the driver on the internet and download it. Windows is pretty good about doing that and getting it set up for you.

Now, what if you are like me and all the sound cards for Windows look like their device drivers are good? It should work, right?! If you're like me you'll have to calm yourself down and not throw your computer in the lake. Just keep following the steps. It really takes no kind of time (10 minutes or so) to go through the whole process.

2. Now you need to find out what your sound cards for Windows are. In most computers these days the sound cards for Windows are built right into the motherboard and this was the case for mine as well. For the sake of this article, I'm going to assume your card is part of the motherboard. Now we have to find out the type of motherboard that you have.

Restart your computer. As it "boots," in the very first screen, click your "Pause" key on your keyboard. On this screen will be, usually right before the information about the "BIOS," there will be what your motherboard is. Write it down.

Take that name and add "motherboard manual pdf" to it and put all that in a search engine. In my case, I would go to Google, type in "A7M266-D motherboard manual pdf" and look for a pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file. I've done it hundreds of time, and with a little looking you can find it. Once you find it, save it somewhere. You'll be amazed how handy that manual may be.

Of course, I'm assuming that you don't have the motherboard manual already in your hands. If you do have it, great! Then you can skip that last step.

Now, look through the manual and see what audio card it has. Usually you can just hit Ctrl+F and that will let you "find" what you are looking for via a search. Now you know what your sound cards for Windows are.

3. Once you know what sound card you have, go to the makers web site and download the driver. In my case, it was a C-media CM18738 PCI audio controller. C-media had a very helpful site; I just looked around for drivers and downloads. In no time I had downloaded the driver to my computer.

4. Now, this next step is something I might do but may not recommend. I would open the sound card driver for Windows that I down loaded, look for the executable file (ends with ".exe") and run it. However, almost always there is a document that's called "README.txt." If you open this it will tell you what to do. I'm just usually not that patient, so I just run the exe file. This starts the driver installation process.

5. Follow the steps it asks for (restarting your computer and stuff like that).

Then, suddenly, once the computer restarts, you hear the Windows loading sound. Now you know that your sound cards for Windows are good to go!