Windows 7 HD Audio Device

[seekermeister]

Since having done a clean install of the OS, I've been having some problems with audio, which weren't occurring with the old installation. Generally the sound is normal, so long as there is only one app running that uses sound, but say there is a movie playing, and at the same time one is playing Spider Solitaire, the sound became tinny and distorted.

I thought that I had found the solution when Windows popped a message saying that the sound was missing a driver. That seemed odd because the Device Manager shows all sound devices working normally, but I decided to give it a shot anyway. The driver that it led me to was for a C Media Oxygen HD audio device, which I believe is for my Asus sound card, but when I attempted to install it, it squawked that the device for it needed to be installed.

That is when I noticed that in addition to the sound card, there were four HD audio devices listed below it. All 4 of them were using the same driver, which was labeled as a Microsoft driver. It was then it dawned on me that these devices were probably for the onboard sound, rather than the sound card, so I uninstalled them and checked the BIOS where I found that the onboard sound had somehow become enabled. I disabled it and rebooted, but upon reaching desktop, Windows started installing the drivers for HD audio again. However, now instead of Microsoft drivers, they are Nvidia drivers. I suppose that I could disable the devices, but checking in the old Windows installation, none of them appear in the Device Manager. I checked in services, but didn't find anything that looked like it was related to this. Since they are disabled in the BIOS, how could Windows be seeing them?

 

[seekermeister]

It has has now become clear to me that we are not thinking on the same frequency, and our thoughts and opinions are out of sync. I have never found it necessary to enable or install drivers for an on-board sound system to be able to get quality sound from a quality add-on sound card. My objective is as it has always been, to eliminate all traces of the on-board sound system. Therefore this discussion is going nowhere.

 

[Pauli]

Understood. Hope you get it running.

 

[Jimbo22]

I wonder, since they keep re-installing themselves after you uninstall them....I'm thinking maybe just disable that service all together from the service panel. Check this out....

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/12411-services-start-stop-disable-windows-8-a.html

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