My pc is a bit old, with 810e fst murcury intel chipset motherboard, pIII 733MHz processor,192 MB sd RAM,40gb hard disk and currently running windows ME. A couple days before I bought tech com 5.1 sound card(mentioning F-MEDIA fm-801-6c chip). My previous sound card was onboard ac97 audio. Now when I am trying to install the driver of the new soundcard it first install it and then suddenly the whole system halts with a black screen. If I restart the machine the new sound card entry in system manager is still yellow and that is it. Can any one help me out why is it happenning and plz give me a solution....

Sounds like the driver didn't install correctly. First of all I need to know have you disabled the onboard sound in your bios? You'll need to go into bios and look for something about ac97 audio and there will be an option to disable it. After you've disabled it, you should then uninstall whatever drivers you've installed so far for the sound card, and then attempt to reinstall them. If you get a black screen again can you please post the steps you took. Thank you. Also if you could post the rest of your system specs that would be helpful..

it's time to upgrade. either buy a new computer, or buy xp. the driver for ME probably doesn't work properly, or maybe there is no driver for ME.

STOP right here.

There are known driver conflicts within DOS-kernel Windows (or whatever they're called, under Windows 2000), and especially when it comes to sound (WDM + VXD = what a mess!).

- When you have placed your recent sound card, have you thought of uninstalling the other sound drivers? Anyway, you HAVE to do this step in SAFE MODE! That way [through Device manager], you remove the driver ENTIRELY, so it doesn't try install automatically again later. (A driver uninstall via Add/Remove Programs is usually also good, but I prefer double-checking in safe mode ) This step is vital, as more than one sound driver led me to a catastrophe right yesterday... (Win98SE here)
- Next, the drivers need to be picked carefully and tried several times if required (yes, this sucks). Nobody cares about old Windows nowadays (End Of Life & Support Services), so you might finish off at a site like DriverGuide.com instead of the official brand's for needed driver. ^_^