No Sound on Laptop, can't view DVD's

[Guest]

I loaded Vista RC1 build 5600 on my Gateway 9550 laptop and everything runs
well, except I get no sound at all. The sound chip is an ESS Allegro ES1998.
I installed Win XP audio drivers to see if it works, but it didn't.

Even worse, this seems to affect PowerDVD and Windows Media Center from
running DVD's. Everytime. I try to run a dvd in those programs, it freezes or
gives me a message saying "no audio device installed."

I checked the windows update area for any updates and nothing. Any help to
resolve this would be greatly appreciate it.

 

[JW]

DVD Decoders don't necessarily support all Sound cards and their drivers.
Check the power DVD documentation. The problem is most likely caused by the
lack of Vista drivers for the sound card or the inability of the XP drivers
to run sucessfully in XP compatibility mode in Vista. Run Winupdate on your
system to see if Vista drivers for your sound card have been recently
released to and qualified by MS. Have you tried contacting support for your
audio card manufactuter and gotten any response from them?

 

[Guest]

I tried the Winupdate feature and nothing was found to fix the problem. I
will continue checking for an update. On that same laptop, PowerDVD 5 ran
perfect on WinXP SP2 using the same drivers.

 

[JW]

In order to improve system security there are restrictions in the Vista
hardware interfaces that did not exist in the XP hardware interfaces so not
all XP drivers will run not even if they are installed in are are being run
in XP compatibility mode.