A customer had a sound card that wasn’t working.

The PC had been through an XP reinstall after a virus infection, but it looked like most of the drivers had been installed correctly, except for the sound.

After a quick check, I find that it has a built in intel 82801db (ch4) sound card. I remember seeing something similar not too long ago.

I run the intel chiputil.exe utility, and it confirms that is its a 82801db chipset.

More browsing of the intel website, shows that I can downlod something for the 845 chipset…

the most suitable download is called the INF update utility (infinst.exe) apparently: “This utility installs INF files that inform the operating system how to properly configure the chipset for specific functionality such as USB and AGP” 

OK, I run infinst.exe, and after a few minutes, it completes, and asks to restart windows.

After the restart, the sound device is still showing an error under device manager.

I try running “add new hardware”, but it fails to automatically detect the sound driver.

I delete the sound driver, restart windows, but the (automatically starting) add hardware utility still doesn’t find the correct sound drivers.

I run infinst again, but still no luck.

I run “add hardware” from control panel (again), but this time, I manually select to add the hardware, I pick audio drivers, Install hardware from a list, “sound, video and game controllers”, manufacturer: intel, then I select the generic intel driver, ac97 driver, “next” a few more prompts, and after a few minutes, the sound is finally working again…

What a lot of work, just to install a sound driver!