Member Avatar for odellcs

dearest daniweb.com techs
i am at my witts end but i feel there may be a community here that can lead me in the right direction! thanks much for your very anticipated help

here we go...

i am running a celeron 1.7 that i built several years ago. i have a spacewalker motherboard and i have two ide hard drives and an old ide hp cd-writer. i have a creative labs soundblaster live 5.1 sound card installed in the pci. just recently i added a matrox 16 mb dual vga graphics card. now, when i am playing music (i usually use winamp but i have also experienced the issue while using napsters program) and surfing the net (most prominent with firefox, but also noticed in ie) i get these beeping ssounds when i click to load something. when i go into my ebay, it will beep constantly until the page is fully loaded. and if i click on another tab it will beep then too. the beeping does not happen if i am not already running a program using the sound card. does anyone have any idea what this might be? i have upraded to the newest drivers for my sound card. the problem is that i also installed some a/v codec programs just before/after i installed the PCI graphics card. i have since uninstalled the software. XP automatically found the driver for my matrox card. if there is any other info i can give, i will be happy too! thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Catweazle

Dani AI

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Short summary and likely cause (so the thread stays useful years later): the symptoms you described — Winamp or Napster playing fine until you click a web link, then short beeps/clicks while the page loads — strongly point to a resource/driver timing conflict between the Sound Blaster Live card and the newly added Matrox VGA card (or to a driver/DPC latency spike caused by the Matrox driver). Switching to the onboard audio removed the symptom, which makes a hardware/driver interaction the most likely root rather than purely a codec glitch. (soundonsound.com)

Practical, ordered tests to isolate and fix it:

  • Reproduce clean: boot with only the SB Live (remove Matrox) and test; then boot with only Matrox + onboard audio. If the beeps only happen with both present, it confirms an interaction.
  • Check resources: open Device Manager (Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager), use View > Resources by connection to see IRQ/PCI assignments — look for IRQ or memory ranges shared by the video and sound devices. (learn.microsoft.com)
  • Swap slots and drivers: try the SB Live in a different PCI slot and/or update (or roll back) Creative and Matrox drivers and update the motherboard BIOS. Many audio glitches are cured by moving a card to a different slot or by driver/BIOS updates. (soundonsound.com)
  • Measure latency: on XP use a DPC-latency checker to see whether a driver spikes whenever you click (graphics, network or codec-related drivers often show up). That helps target which driver to update or disable. (sweetwater.com)
  • Codecs note (for ): third-party codec packs or DirectShow filters can misregister and break playback behavior, so reinstalling a clean codec set or removing suspected filters is reasonable — but only after the hardware/IRQ checks, since OP already found onboard audio works. (zachd.com)

If the SB Live must be kept and no slot/driver/BIOS change fixes it, the long-term options are a different PCI sound card (less picky about IRQ sharing) or using the onboard audio permanently. Test and change one thing at a time and document what removes the beeps.

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Member Avatar for Catweazle

I would try reloading the a/v codecs to see if that corrects the problem. If it does, try uninstalling them again afterwards.

Reloading might overwrite with uncorrupted files and stop the behaviour.

Member Avatar for odellcs

thanks for your quick reply,
two things:
1) i am not sure how to reinstall codecs
2) i installed the drivers for the sound that came integrated into my motherboard, tried using that and i am no longer experiencing the beeps. can you give further advice?
thanks

Member Avatar for Catweazle

My further advice is that if the beeps are gone the problem must be fixed!

:D

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