Question No sound from Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS sound card

[Carandini]

My Santa Cruz sound card from Turtle Beach on my Dell Dimension 8100 stopped working. I found a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS PCI sound card that is compatible with my Windows 98SE operating system. I forgot to first uninstall any Santa Cruz software. The new sound card installation appeared to have completed and passes the Creative diagnostics, but there is no sound.

Could there be Santa Cruz drivers or other software interfering with my new sound card? If so, how can I remove them?

There are no Santa Cruz entries under sound, video, game controllers in the Device Manager. There is still a Turtle Beach folder under the Program Files folder with Santa Cruz Control Panel and Drivers folders. There are no Santa Cruz programs listed in the add/remove programs part of the Control Panel.

Unfortunately, I don't have any Santa Cruz installation software. Is there anything I can do short of wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

According to Creative Labs support, the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS is not supported on Windows versions prior to Windows XP (ie no compatible drivers):

https://support.creative.com/downloads/welcome.aspx?nLanguageLocale=1033&nDriverType=1#type_1

 

[Carandini]

Thank you so much for being willing to look into my problem! My heart sank when I read your reply, as I had specifically purchased this sound card so that I could use it with an old version of DartPro that only works with Windows 98SE.

When I tried to follow the link you kindly provided, I kept ending up at https://support.creative.com/welcome.aspx#type_1, which is a search page. I tried searching Audigy2 zs and was surprised that Creative is apparently still supporting my sound card even for Windows 10! I'm not sure that I found the page that you tried to link for me, however.

According to the manual on the cd that was provided with my sound card, the following are the hardware requirements:

Audigy 2 ZS hardware

• Genuine Intel® Pentium® III or Celeron® 350 MHz, or equivalent AMD-K6® 450 MHz processor or faster
• Intel, AMD or 100% compatible motherboard chipset
• Microsoft® Windows® 98 SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Windows XP
• 64 MB RAM for Windows 98 SE and Windows Me
• 128 MB RAM for Windows 2000 (SP2) and Windows XP
• 600 MB of free hard disk space
• Available PCI 2.1 or higher compliant slot for the audio card
• Available adjacent slot for the included Joystick/MIDI bracket
• Headphones or amplified speakers (available separately)
• CD-ROM/CD-RW or DVD-ROM drive required for software installation

My computer has an Intel Pentium 4 processor (1.5 GHz) with 512 MB RDRAM and a PCI slot. I don't know how to check on the motherboard chipset or whether the PCI slot is 2.1 or higher.

Do you think there might still be a compatibility problem with my computer?