A nice lady comes in and says that she wants to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP. We check her ram and find it minimal, but sufficient. We check her current data and find that she had recently crashed and reloaded XP and all her data is gone. Well, this looks like it is going to be an easy installation of Windows 7. The operation is very routine. We repartition and format the hard drive and then load Windows 7. Windows 7 found most of the hardware drivers. We update those and find and install the others. We download all the OS updates and then load on the basic, free programs that she will find useful.
Somewhere toward the end of this process we notice that her audio is not working. The driver is loaded and says it is happy, but the control panel tells us that there is no audio device. The troubleshooting process begins: Go download the latest driver (again) and load it. Still no audio device detected. Download another driver that probably isn’t the right one, but we want to try it. Still no audio device detected. We uninstall then reinstall drivers and reboot. Nope, no audio device detected. Actually, when scanning for new hardware it does see the audio device, but none of the listed drivers, nor others we try, will make the hardware work.
Okay, so we write off the problem as a hardware error or a Windows 7 incompatibility. I install a PCI audio card to get around the on-board hardware and run the driver installation. It doesn’t go well. There was something strange about the installation process—no error messages, but it didn’t seem complete. The result is no audio device is found. I double check and this sound card and driver are Windows 7 compatible. So we uninstall, reboot, and reinstall. I get a “Platform not supported: error 0” message. Hmmm. I go to the company website and download the current driver for this platform. Again I get the “Platform not supported” message. This is getting frustrating. I reboot and reinstall with an error message. I select the “diagnose” and reinstall option. Hey, this time it says it loaded. Is there sound? Why, yes there is. Hurray! The computer wants to reboot to cement the installation and so we do. When it comes back up there is “No audio device found.” Do I shoot the computer or shoot myself? Then an intuition strikes me. I take out the old modem that is in the other PCI slot and put the audio card in it. I reinstall the driver. I get an installation error, but diagnose and reinstall and it loads. Yes, I have sound. I reboot. Again I have sound. I reboot several times and play YouTube videos and music and have sound every time. I put the gun away and the computer and I live another day. Apparently we had a bad PCI slot. Computers, so simple yet so complex.
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