Hello everyone and thanks in advance for any help you can give me. This problem is driving me nuts!!

First, some background info:
I'm running Win ME on an HP Pavilion 8785c. 128mBytes RAM. I have a Riptide combo sound card/modem card. I have a MIDI keyboard plugged into the MIDI port on the sound card.

My sound card was working on Saturday. I was actively using it while starting to experiment with composing music on this PC. I am using Cakewalk's Music Creator 2003. The program was working and so was the sound card. I was able to press a musical key on the MIDI keyboard, hear the sound out of the sound card, and also record the note that I played in Music Creator. My only complaint was that the note was recorded after a short delay. This put the note in the wrong place on the musical staff in Music Creator.

I did some research and tried another music composition program called NoteWorthy Composer. The same problem existed. I could play a note, hear the note, but record the note on the staff after a short delay. I wanted to get rid of this delay.

As I did more research, I learned that a newer driver may solve the problem.

The driver I was using was dated 5/16/2000. I found an updated driver dated August of 2000. I downloaded it and installed it. That's when the sound card stopped making sound.

So I tried to undo the installation and go back to the old, original driver (that did work, but was slow). My BIG mistake was that I did NOT set a restore point in Windows before installing the new driver. My bad, and I won't make that mistake again, ever.

Without the restore point to go back to, I tried to figure out what files were installed when the new driver was installed. I found what I thought were the files and renamed them by adding "----" as a prefix to the file name. Then I went the to the Device Manager and removed the installed driver for the sound card and the modem. Then I reboot the PC thinking that Windows would detect the sound card and reinstall the original driver (because I renamed the new driver files).

After reboot, Windows did see the hardware and reinstalled the driver but the driver installed was the new one that does not work. I tried everything I can think of to avoid having the new driver installed, but with every attempt, the new non-working driver gets installed. Hence my request for help.

With all of that said, here are my questions:
1) Will the procedure that I described work if I can determine which files to rename?
2) To get my sound card to function again, do I need to edit the registry?
3) Is it smarter/better/faster/less aggravating to just go out and buy a new sound card with faster drivers? (I might wind up getting a new card, but at this point, I REALLY want to figure out how to get my existing sound card working again.)

Thanks again. Sorry about the long entry, but I wanted to provide as much info as possible.

Matt

Hey Matt!
Welcome to PC Helpforum!

Right-click 'My computer', click 'Properties', click 'Hardware'-tab, click 'Device manager.
Right-click your sound device, click 'Properties', click 'Driver' tab. There's an option to recover your old driver there.

Blue

Blue,

Thanks for the suggestion. On the 'Driver Tab" the choices are "Driver Files Details..." or "Update Driver...". The details show the files installed. I tried renaming these files, but they keep getting reinstalled (after I removed the device from Device Manager and reboot). The update tab has Windows search for the driver and Wnidows always says the best driver is already installed. Do you have any other suggestions? thanks..............Matt

Ah sorry you're using ME.
You can try to uninstall the device, and reinstall it using the original drivers.