Sound Output Suddenly Muted And Fuzzy

[unimatrix 0]

My dad has an older Compaq with an Aureal 3D chipset and he said one day he came down, went to listen to a CD and nothing would come out of the speakers. Or almost nothing, the sound is extremely muted and fuzzy. Only loud parts of music or files play and then it has a lot of static. It is not the speakers, I hooked those up to my Ipod, sound was clear. Used by headphones and had the same result, dull and staticy.The best way I can discribe the sound is either like a blown speaker or an AM radio station on an old dial tuner that isn't quite dialed in. I checked all the settings, he hadn't installed or updated anything. He said one day it worked, the next day it didn't. I had an old Aureal Vortex 2 card (Diamond MX400), but over the years lost the drivers and Diamond apparently no longer provides them online for download either. Tried for find other drivers online and install, but they never correctly detected the new card. Windows knows it's there, but the drivers say "Please make sure the MX400 is plugged in". So I gave up on that idea.Basically I have no idea why this is happening. The Mic is disabled and I there isn't anything else around that I know of that would be creating any type of electrical interfernce with the signal. I am at a loss. The computer is almost 7 years old anyway and this looks to be the year that he'll have to get a new one. (Especially if Tax Cut doesn't come out with a version that'll run on 98SE). So if it doesn't get fixed it will not be a big deal, but I've never experienced this happening to any other system in my numous years in IT and just wondered if anyone might know why this happens?

[HellFire121 0]

Probably the sound cards dead or will die soon, if your computer is 7 years old that would probably be the reason. If you are going to get i new computer i would suggest that you buy the parts from a computer shop and build one yourself. It would be the cheapest way.My computer is almost 6 years old and nothing much has happened, might have to keep an eye open for the rest of the year :)Or else you could just replace the soundcard with a cheap one, the aureal card would probably be worth about $20 now.

[unimatrix 0]

What I suspected. When it dies finally, I'm marching him up to the Apple store and he's getting shiny new iMac and be done with it. He can use the Taxcut online edition or get turbotax for Mac. I already have quicken and quickbooks for Mac I can give him, so....