Yellow Question Marks

Don't eat the yellow question marks.

Does installing a generic driver work?

Do you have access to your windows installation disc?

Have you run a virus scan to check for viruses, malware, etc?

Install a previous backup copy of your hard drive.

Since you have no install disks, the computer is too slow, Hardware is not working - how about buying a new computer just this one time!

Gives you all you need in one go and no hardship working XP which is getting more and more problematic.

My two cents!

(you might want to take the affected hard ware out of the computer. Deinstall all drivers. Physically delete what you can find of them. Check the installation guide of the hard ware. Some needs to be installed first before inserted! Then insert the card or whatever it is - if its on the main board forget what I said and only resinstall after physical deletion of drivers. Make sure you have the correct driver.

By the way did you properly deinstall the other software? Maybe some stuff is still resilent and stuffing you up.

Oh man and then just as already was said, check for malware. Ups forgot you had XP ...)

I am disables and am on a fixed income. nothing is getting cheaper. I can't find a regular driver or generic. Any ideas where I can Look?

Thanks

I think Frank offers a good and cheap solution. just disable the other soundcard either in the BIOS or in the Hardware config.

Have you tried the obvious of going into device manager and saying to update the driver and letting it search, I am guessing that didn't work.

Do you know the make of the computer or if not the make and model of the motherboard. If you know neither you could always open up the computer and the motherboard should have something on it with a make and model. Use that to look up the driver for that board, if you don't have and can't get who makes it, and what it is it is going to be difficult.

The other option other than buying a new computer is to get a cheap $2 or less usb sound card that will come with its own driver and forget about finding the driver. Something like this one, but can be found for under $1.50 on ebay.

Find out the manufacturer & model of the mother board go to their site & download the latest drivers it's as simple as that.

I have the same problem - different cause - I was deleting some old unused s/w from my PC and ended up in the same situation, however I have the original driver disc for the PC and I have tried re-installing all the drivers but have not fixed the problem.

Every time I re-boot it comes up with 'New PCI device found' 'Install?' ...... asking it to install automatically (and find the appropriate drivers on the internet) is unsuccessful in that after contemplating its navel for some time it comes up with 'could not install hardware'

If during the same procedure I present it with the original driver disc the result is the same ......

I am coming to the conclusion that it is probably a 'nominally' unrelated windows dll or other windows program which is in some way vital to the installation of the drivers for this device and has been removed, disabled or damaged during the other s/w uninstall, and since I have no record of the s/w I uninstalled, it is rather difficult to go back ........ I have tried using a restore point before the event, and the system finds such points, however when I try to restore it goes through the restore procedure then pops up a message 'unable to restore, reverting to previous state' - or words to that effect......

When I finally find time to build a new PC it will be a LINUX box, and I will purge all MS products .......

I have had to do the same as the OP has done after uninstalling a program. It has been a wondrous tale of reloading the original drivers from the manufactures over the last 10 years of fixing my fathers computer, after he experiments with all the latest trials then uninstall them & things stop working. In the early days of win 98 I often had to reinstall the op system because the damage was beyond my experience (took me many sleepless nights doing the fresh install) but when we both went to XP it was so much easier 9 out of 10 times it was just a matter of making sure all of the other program was removed & then manually go through & reinstall the drivers obtained from the manufacturers web site. Usually only 1 or 2 things would be affected but I would go through & reinstall ALL of the updated drivers as it would make sure I didn't have to come back 2 days later when something else played up

If it is coming up saying "New PCI device found' 'Install?" Then I would Identify what that PCI device is, do you have a card in 1 of your PCI slots? If yes then find out who the manufacturer is & get the driver from their website.

Separate PCI card drivers will not be on the mother board disk & depending on what that card is a lot of times XP won't have a generic driver & the manufacturer will be the only place to get the driver.

As JPool said Download a system information viewer & it will tell you info on your computer & things plugged into it if that doesn't work take out the PCI card & write down any model number on the board & google them. I have found info on many cards this way even when I didn't know the manufacturer only the number on the board.

I have eventually fixed it,

There were three different PCI devices it was complaining about, and it wouldn't or couldn't tell me which one it was concerned with at the time.

There were two SCSI interfaces from different manufacturers and the audio interface.

It would not re-install the drivers from the original media - CDs, DVDs or floppies.

Once I had identified the manufacturers I had to download the drivers from their websites and then install them, and the installation procedures were all different, non-intuitive and not well documented.

Like Brett said.

Do you use the onboard sound or do you have a sound card? If you use a soundcard you can just disable the multimedia audio controller.

It sounds like you use the onboard, though. Where are your speakers plugged into? The motherboard or an add-on card?

What is the make/model of your computer?