i have a 9 month old gateway and i do all that i can to keep it up to date... however, every once in a while music doesn't play, but system sounds do. i've been on the remote assistance program with a gateway technician twice to solve these issues.

he fixed it and then told me that it was because i had spybot search and destroy, adaware, windows defender, and mcafee all used... whatever that meant. then he told me to go to msconfig and uncheck these programs. there was nothing to uncheck becuz these programs don't run at startup... i did however uncheck the AOL boxes and real player box.

after i did that, the bottom of my screen started to do that whole greyish color swap thng where it looks like the taskbar is trying to go back to windows 2000 display. AND my audio driver AGAIN said it wasn't installed after i did these msconfig changes. i guess i want to know what's going on and how to make both of those annoying things go away. i've reinstalled my sigma tel audio driver about 5 times and it keeps happening. that gray crap at the bottom keeps coming back too. help me help me! before i bash it in and i regret it haha.

welcome to dal the online computer help forum



i presume that you are using xp by the age of the computer have you tried doing a system restore to a point before you started having problems

if you need help to do this please get back to us

I've done system recovery on the driver about 20 times total now. I even tried downloading a new audio driver and am still having problems. I thought I fixed it yesterday and when I turned it on today, it said i had an audio driver... then I started iTunes and checked the driver - it said i didn't have one, but iTunes was still playing music. I don't get it. I closed iTunes and reopened it, then music didnt play.

I bought Dvd-Cloner for $70 and if I do system restore, won't my files get deleted? I don't think I could download that again. Also, I'm somewhat naive on how to backup all of my thousands and thousands of files on my computer... can i put them all on dvds that have lots more room? I do have a dvd-rw drive.

Oh, and I've talked to the gateway techs 4 times for a total of about two hours. He thought the gray changes at the bottom of the screen were because of a conflict between xp display settings and audio drivers. He suggested getting something called The Shield - but i've never heard of it - anyone?

Thanks.