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You see, it was all about how I almost lost the “audio” on my computer a few weeks ago, i.e. back then that day I was looking a bit through the “Add or Remove Programs” Control Panel’s applet, and saw an entry for PCI Audio (or something along those lines, I forgot the exact wordings), and I am really not sure why, but I wanted to get more information about that particular item. And so I clicked on the “Change/Remove” button, and to my big surprise, the damned thing was uninstalled from my system immediately, i.e. there was no additional prompt to confirm the “remove” action.
As always in such cases, I opened a thread that I titled “Hehe folks: one more typically-shirker story”: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/… on my favorite computing-related “Ars Technica” forum in which I described the situation in great details. I really recommend you to visit it (of course, if you’re interested at all) and see the details for yourself, but just in case I am also posting my initial post (with the word “initial” I simply mean the first post in the thread) in that thread right here below.
Here’s the text of my initial post:
“It’s all about how I almost lost “audio” yesterday. You see, yesterday I was looking a bit through the “Add or Remove Programs” Control Panel’s applet, and saw an entry for PCI Audio (or something like that, unfortunately I forgot to exact wordings), and I am not sure why, but I wanted to get info about it. Therefore I clicked on “Change/Remove” button, and to my surprise, the god-damned thing was uninstalled/removed from my system right away, with no additional prompt to confirm the action.
Then I noticed right away that audio-related icon disappeared from the taskbar; btw., this “PCI Audio” thing were the drivers required for my main non-mobo Guillemot-Maxi Sound Muse sound-card (using: C-Media CMI8738/C3DX audio chip/adapter/controller/wave device; not sure which term is correct, since it says all of these in various manuals/specifications, and in Windows Control Panel’s applets) to work. OK well, I said to myself, I will just restart the PC and install the drivers again. Then after rebooting, there was this “New Hardware” window that popped-up, saying that it needs to install “Multimedia Audio Controller”, and I can also see it in the Device Manager with yellow question mark beside.
But now to the really bad part. As I wrote in the recent http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/24609792/… (What’s wrong with CD/DVD drives in general …) thread here on Ars, my NEC CD/DVD-RW drive started refusing to recognize any CDs, so I realized in horror that maybe I couldn’t install the drivers from the CD at all. And that would mean that I would be without audio till I buy another CD or DVD drive, and put it into my computer!!
Anyway, luckily I discovered afterward that my on-board AVANCE 97 sound-card (on VT82C686B “south bridge” audio chip, using VIA AC’97 DMA-based controller (WDM); similarly to above, I’m not sure which term is correct, that’s why I posted all of them) is still working.
shirker”
P.S. - As you can read in the thread link above, I luckily discovered afterwards that my in-built on-board AVANCE 97 sound-card (using VIA AC’97 DMA-based controller) is still working since it doesn’t require any special/additional drivers installed.
Ivan Tadej (user: “tayiper”)
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