Sound cards

[kirisutogomen]

Calling all Course 6s? So I think the onboard sound in our desktop computer is dying. Hopefully I'm interpreting the symptoms correctly.

If so, it seems to me that my best solution is to buy a sound card. Am I right? If the onboard sound on the motherboard is malfunctioning, will that malfunction a sound card too, or can I just tell the onboard sound to shut up and let the sound card take over? (And how would I tell it that?) And what question am I not asking that I should be?

Also, grrrrrr.

Comments

[countertorque.livejournal.com]

You can stick a sound card in there and tell the onboard sound card to shut up in the BIOS. I had to do this on my comp a year or so ago and it's been fine since. You probably don't have to tell the on board sound to shut up, just don't connect any speakers to it. It's possible the computer benefits slightly from not having to generate every sound twice.

Asking a course 6 to answer this question is like asking you to help with my taxes or asking me to help fix your car.

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

Yep. My thought is "isn't that what the IT guys are for?"

[dcltdw]

Well, some of us have built on own computers.

(And some of us have bought an imac because we don't know jack about computers. :D )

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, that's what the question mark is for.

[mathhobbit.livejournal.com]

When I built my own computer I (eventually) bought a sound card, which may still be kicking around someplace. Let me know if you want to try using it in your computer.

I've never heard of a sound card failing, onboard or otherwise, but obviously countertorque has.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Hopefully sound cards are inexpensive enough that I'll just buy one, unless there's some really convenient way of transferring possession of it.

I'm kind of guessing here, but the symptoms don't go away when I swap the speakers for other speakers or headphones, and I get the same symptoms from the front audio jack as from the rear one. (The symptoms are not a lack of sound, but that the sound is, in technical terms, fucked up.)

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, but I don't think people get to be IT guys by going Course 20.

disclaimer: coourse 18

[treptoplax.livejournal.com]

I might try some live-cd first to verify it's hardware and not OS corruption somehow. I may also have an old sound card. Note also that for not much more than a new midrange sound card you may be able to replace motherboard.

Re: disclaimer: course 18

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I didn't think of a Live-CD. And you were 18C, weren't you? That counts.

And replacing the motherboard may be the bestest solution, especially if I can then put the "old" motherboard in the old Dell.

Re: disclaimer: course 18

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Well, I made a Knoppix CD, and booted from it, and it failed to autodetect the motherboard's onboard sound at all. So I don't know any other reasonable way to determine whether it's an OS issue, unless there's some reason to expect that some other distribution would do better than Knoppix? Or maybe I should make a bootable DVD?

I'm still mostly convinced that it's a hardware dysfunction, and at this point I am less concerned with expense and more with how quickly I can get this resolved. So if replacing the motherboard is significantly more complicated than just shoving a sound card in there, as I suspect it would be (wouldn't I be pulling a CPU off of one board and nailing it to the new one? That sounds like the sort of thing I shouldn't be doing), I am inclined toward a sound card regardless of whether it's a terribly cost effective solution.

As far as old sound cards go, I have no idea how nicely Vista plays with random N-year-old sound cards. (As you may have surmised by now, I don't really know much of anything.)