Help With my Audio Device Situation?

So I recently got a Gateway desktop computer with Vista Home Premium. It worked great for about 5 days. Then on I think it was the 25th or 26th of June that the Windows automatic updates installed onto my computer. This caused a disaster with my sound driver. It made it disappear. I've tried going into my device manager, but there is nothing in there about Sigmatel audio devices or anything. So for some reason the updates have made it impossible for me to uninstall and reinstall my sound driver, because it just disappeared.

I have also tried to download the newest driver from the gateway website. But I get a message saying it cannot find the device that the driver goes to. Because somehow, the windows update made my sound card disappear from my PC. So I come here to ask if there is any way of doing this other than factory wipes. Because I've done them 2 times already, and the updates manage to sneak by me each time. Can anyone help? Or do you think that MS will release something to repair my "lost" sound device?

First of all, you need to learn to use Google to find drivers. I found a Vista driver from Gateway in less that one minute at the following location:



http://www.driverzone.com/device.php...67&show_devs=a



Second, check to see if you can uninstall the Windows Update. Open Windows Update, View History, click Installed Updates. Try removing the updates one by one. That may restore your drivers, but my guess is that it will not.



Third, turn off automatic updates in Windows update. Only have it check and/or download. That way, you have a chance to examine the details on each one before you install it.



Finally, if none of this works, contact Gateway and see what kind of support they offer. Surely, the machine being only a few days old, they must offer some kind of warrantly program to restore your machine.

If you cant see it listed in the hardware in device manager hit the button at the top of device manager which refreshs the page so to speak (it checks for new hardware, this should detect your sound device and list it in the 'unknown device' section in device manager.

Assuming you have checked any connections to the device are good and not sloppy and if you have tried the remove from device list in device manager view, so it gets detected and enumerated on the next boot...............

itcould be a case of the ACPI driver not assigning an IRQ for the device making it transparent on the system bus it's attached to. 2 things to check, first that there is no listing for ACPI warnings in 'event viewer', it would be a warning as distinct from critical and then in system information look to see what information there is in there about IRQ's and either forced hardware or shared resources.

Next thing to do is check that resources are being controlled by ACPI in the BIOS and not by the OS and the device shows in there under configs for PCI or onboard devices.

Lastly check that you have the latest ACPI driver for the board and if all fails try setting the BIOS ESD reset to enabled (it will resume it's disabled state) this will do nothing unless there is a serious IRQ or resource conflict causing part of the Bus to be unseen, then it will re-assign resources to sort it out, there will be a slightly longer delay on the next boot whilst 're-enumeration' of devices\drivers is sorted out by the system, but it should be ok then.