Driver Frustrations.

[Sever]

Ok, so i bought my computer back from my unit in Perth and set it up at my parents. The next day i accidentally left a cat stuck in my room and he tear-assed round the place causing mischief - most notably pulling the grahics cable from the back of the box and bending all the pins. I've since fixed that with a pair of tweezers and all seems to be running well. That problem solved, i installed the game F.E.A.R and tried to play it but was unable to get the sound working. First step on the list of recommendations in the readme was to update my sound card drivers. A logical step since they've not been updated since i bought it a year and a half ago. I downloaded a self installer for the SB Audigy from Creative's site and tried to run it. The program told me that it could not locate the proper hardware and terminated. Thinking that i'd have to uninstall the old drivers for it to work, i did so. It didn't work, of course, and now i'm stuck without the original driver disk (with all the rest of my software in Perth) and no sound at all on my computer.

I'm getting serious deja-vu here. Every time i try to do something as simple as installing a driver, something major always stuffs up. Last time it was nVidia drivers which knocked out several important mobo drivers and left me without internet for the best part of a month. Am i jinxed? WTF can't these things just work like they're supposed to?

Anyway, with no way of getting the original driver disk anytime soon, i'm thinking about trying the system restore. I was nearly going to do it last stuff-up, but thought better of it. Now i don't see any alternatives.

1. Can somebody here who has used the XP sys-restore please talk me through it so i can avoid any further stuff-ups.

2. The driver i downloaded was the latest version of SB Audigy. Are there different variants of this card? I DLd what i thought to be the only driver on the list that fit the bill but the installer keeps telling me that it can't find the hardware.

[Bungleau]

Sever,

I've done it before, and it's pretty straightforward. Boot up the machine, go into Start Menu, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. Simply follow the directions for the restore, picking a restore point from when you knew things were good.

Two caveats:

1. It reverts the system back to that date. Any registry changes since then will be backed out... hopefully, you've got an idea of what things you've added since then. You may need to reinstall them.

2. I make no promises on what it will do with data you've added since then. I *think* it leaves it alone, but I won't swear to it. It'd be a good idea to back up any important things first...

Final thought: the original message was basically "hardware not found". You might want to reseat the card to make sure it's in properly. All the driver updates in the world won't help if the hardware's not there...

[Sever]

The exact message was: "Setup is unable to locate a supported product on your system. blah blah."

Nothing wrong with the hardware. It worked fine when i was playing Halo and Wolfenstein not 5 mins before i tried installing the driver. The driver i DLd actually encompasses the entire range of Audigy products from the original through to 4 and SE variants so that can't be the problem either. I'm in the process of DLing another 3rd party driver (i think i've breached the download limit. Slow as.) so i'll see if that one makes any difference before resorting to sys-restore.

I'm not too worried about lost data with the restore as i've not done anything with it for over a month. At worst, i may have to reinstall FEAR.

I'll see how it goes. Thanks B.

[Sever]

It seems my fear of the almighty sys-restore was ill-founded. No problems to report. Back to square one i suppose. Still can't get sound to run while playing FEAR. I've tried the second suggested option of installing the codec included with the game but no help there either. I believe i had similar problems while playing X2 and eventually had to convert the entire sound file into a non-mp3 format which took a lot of hoop jumping to accomplish. Seems to be that mp3 game sounds don't work. Perhaps it's a problem with one of my existing codecs?..

Edit: Somewhere in XP there's a function which enables the reshuffling of the order of audio codecs. Can someone refresh my memory?..

Still couldn't get the SB driver to update, btw. Don't know what's going on with that.

[TheDutkanator]

You could try to download the latest MP3 codec. Not sure if that'll do much to help you though. Does your mobo have on-board audio that you could use? Maybe that will play the audio from FEAR.

In your control panel, (Start->Control Panel) look for "Sounds and Audio". Open that and click the "Audio" tab at the top. You should see a pull-down menu for "Sound playback, default devices". See if there are any other devices in the list. If so, switch to each, one at a time, and click apply, then run the game. If you have no luck, set this back to where it was when you first opened it.

If you still have problems, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX (for XP, you should have DirectX 9.0c). The best way is to just download and install it.

Lastly, if you still have problems:
-Push Start->Run
-Type in "dxdiag" and puch enter. (Then push 'yes')
-Look for the tab at the top named "Sound". Push that, and near the bottom in a white window, there should be a report (and the last line should say "no errors"). If you see errors, there is the problem. If you don't:
-Look for the button at the very bottom that says "Save all information". Push that, save it to your desktop, and then copy/paste the entire contents of it here as well as at the FEAR tech support web site.