what a fucken mess............
NickSpringfield said:
The soundcard is a piece of crap that came with the PC (I recently posted about recommendations for a new one). What I gathered from the lady at Microsoft who spoke severely broken english is that I have to get the disc that came with the PC to get the drivers from there, have HP send me a new disc (for $40 I might add) or go to the website of the card manufacturer and download it from them. I opted for the download and did it while she was still on the phone. Before the download it said something about the driver I was downloading was an older version than the one already installed on my comp and has no Microsoft Digital Signature or whatever. She told me to do it anyway so I did. When trying to install it, I got an insane amount of error messages about not being able to find certain files. As I was clicking "ok" for about the 50th time, my virus scan thing came up and told me that I was just infected with a ton of viruses and made me run a virus scan.
3 hours later, the scan finds almost a thousand viruses/potentially unwanted programs. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm not sure how I got all these bad programs being the only thing I did while online was go to Microsoft.com and I did a Google search for the new drivers to the soundcard. The old harddrive (current slave drive) was previously scanned and cleaned and the new one is brand new, and clean as far as I know up until I signed online. I didn't even want to put the internet on this comp cuz I always get tons of viruses. The laptop I use now is for whatever, but the PC in question is strictly for music. I'm just rambling, but it's problem after problem it seems with this comp.
I'd just go out and buy a cheap card for the meantime if I knew what I was doing, but I don't. I had opened up the tower case and had myself a look, but I don't know one thing from another.
Why the dude didn't check to make sure everything was working properly, especially in my case with the soundcard being he knows what I use the computer for, is beyond me. My luck I guess. Time to find new computer geek friends.
my advice, stop. just stop.
get everything you have together. all the cd's you can find, all the printed material, organize it and write it all down. You need an OS disk, a serial number for the OS, and a driver disk, and application software disks. at a minimum.
SOMEHOW, you need to learn, or to beg, borrow, or pay for the expertise to reformat your hard drive(and not a quick format) and reinstall everything from scratch. before you install the sound drivers, find out what the system restore and driver rollback features are (if you are running xp, if you are not, everything else is worse, I suggest an upgrade to xp if you have the memory and processor for it). you need to set a system rollback point BEFOR your try to do something that may not work. you need to update your virus scan to the latest virus definitions befor you scan and after you reinstall it.
you may not even have a sound card, you may have a sound chip on the motherboard, and if you run out and get a cheap soundblaster card you will most likely have to find a way to turn the on board sound chip OFF. Have you got your original documentaion?
most of these transfer from one disk to another systems, ghost, etc, what do they do to the boot tracks? does xp need to be reactivated?
If everything goes just right, it could, I suppose, be called easy. How's it working out for you, so far? would you describe it as easy?
I don't know where you live, but try, really, really hard to find a computer users group. or maybe there is a votech school where an instructor would take your system in as a class project.
