I recently purchased an AMD Athlon T-bird 1.4 GHZ processor with a ABIT KT7A-KT133A Socket A motherboard. I swapped over, from another computer, two hard drives, an ATI video card, the Aureal Vortex AU8830 sound card, and a DVD drive. I also installed a CD-writer. Now on to my questions:

1) When I load up the computer, I am having problems now where the computer can not run the PCI Communications Device driver (in the device manager it has an exclamation point on that driver). When I downloaded and ran the AMD driver pack to try and correct the problem, the computer told it there wasn't an AMD product installed (though the boot-up screen indicates that there is). I tried loading the driver off the ABIT CD-rom, but none existed (I was able to get the PCI Bridge driver, which also wasn't working previously).

2) I installed a SMC EZ Card (1660) and downloaded the software drivers for it. This will also not work and shows an exclamation point in the device manager (when I load the NE2000 driver it causes my computer to crash, even though Windows says this is the best driver). Could not having the PCI Communications Device driver operational be the cause of my Ethernet card not operating?

3) Finally, the Vortex AU8830 Sound Blaster Emulation Device Driver also has an exclamation point on it. Sound works, but it doesn't work well. Do you know what the cause of this could be?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.


Josh

This is a Via chipset mother board.
You need to install the Via4in1 drivers from the cd that came with the Mother board / system

You also need to install the sound device drivers from the original disk to get the last sound device working

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !

Was everything connected when you first booted up?
If so, then Windows can get confused when trying to recognize and configure a bunch of new hardware.
The best thing to do in this case is to reinstall Windows.

I tried installing all of the drivers that came with the motherboard, but was not able to find one for the PCI Communications device. Once I get this working will that fix my SMC EZ 10/100 EThernet card problem? What network settings should I have to get the Ethernet card operational?

I did have everything plugged in when I installed. Would it be better to reinstall WIndows and add each card one at a time? I guess that would tell me my conflict, if there is one, right?

THANKS!

Originally posted by ski:
Was everything connected when you first booted up?
If so, then Windows can get confused when trying to recognize and configure a bunch of new hardware.
The best thing to do in this case is to reinstall Windows.

Just have the video card installed.

Thanks for all of your help guys.

I tried swapping the cards around and that didn't fix the problem. I installed the VIA4-in-1 drivers. That didn't fix the problem. I got rid of the drivers and added each card one by one. That didn't fix the problem. I did find out a few things though:

* I can get the Aureal Sound Blaster Emulator driver to work if I let the computer disable the printer port. The error message I get says: "Cannot find any free IRQ resources (Code 12) -- requires 5 7 or 9" The computer says it is has no free IRQ resources and I need to disable the printer to have the emulator work.

How can I have the sound blaster emulator and the printer operational at the same time?

* I am not sure if I have the correct driver for my SMC 1660 Ethernet card. I still have a conflict even when I have nothing plugged in but the graphic card and the ethernet card. The error message I am getting is: "The device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all of the drivers installed. (Code 10)"

The card is plugged in and was working in another computer as of a week ago. Can anyone point me in the direction of the correct driver? The only one I could find is titled, "SMC1208bt" When the computer locates the device it identifies the card as a SMC EZ Card (1660).

I feel like I am so close. Any help would be appreciated.

Final question: Would replacing my Aureal Vortex AU8830 card with a Soundblaster Live! card make any sound difference? I am running it with ALtec Lansing power cubes and a subwoofer.

Thanks.

Josh


AMD AThlon 1.4
ABIT KT7A
Aureal Vortex
ATI Rage Pro 128