Troubleshooting

This section addresses potential problems that can occur in all operating system environments, with emphasis on hardware troubleshooting. Within the PC environment there are a limited number of hardware resources (I/O addresses, IRQs, and DMA channels) available for use. Since audio cards require many resources, most audio card installation problems arise from unavailable or improperly set resources. This is important enough to repeat:

IMPORTANT: Most sound card installation problems result from attempting to use system resources (IRQs, address locations) already in use by other hardware (or software acting as “virtual” hardware) in the system.

The Delta 1010LT has been carefully designed to minimize the number of resources consumed (it requires just one IRQ and does not require any DMA channel resources). It is also capable of sharing an IRQ in some cases. However, the possibility of resource conflicts still exists due to the nature of the Windows environment. Many resource conflicts are automatically recognized by Windows’ Plug-and-Play (PnP) system. When a resource conflict is detected, it is displayed in the Windows Device Manager. The Device Manager places a yellow exclamation point on top of the icon associated with the problem device. For an example of how the Device Manager should look when a Delta 1010LT is successfully installed, see the "Verifying Windows Driver Installation" section of this manual. If a yellow exclamation point does appear over your Delta 1010LT icon, you may have a resource conflict. There are several ways to approach this problem.

NOTE: When resolving conflicts between PnP and non-PnP devices, it is recommended to re-adjust the resource settings of the non-PnP device first. Typically, Windows is only aware of the resource settings of the installed PnP devices and has no information available to it for adjusting the PnP devices’ resources around those of the non-PnP devices. The exceptions to this are when: (1) a non-PnP device has a true Windows 98/95 driver written for it, (2) the BIOS setup allows reserving an IRQ for a legacy device as opposed to a PnP device, or (3) resource requirements for the non-PnP device have been manually entered into the Windows Device Manager. In these cases Windows is aware of the non-PnP device’s resource requirements.

One of the quickest ways to change the resources assigned to a PCI card like the Delta 1010LT is to merely relocate the card to another PCI slot. Before doing so, it is a good idea to locate the device in the Device Manager, highlight it, and click “Remove” (in 95/98) or select “Uninstall” from the Actions menu (in Win 2000). With the computer’s power off, remove the Delta 1010LT from its current PCI slot, move it to another available PCI slot, and turn your computer back on. More often than not, this will change the IRQ assignment of the Delta 1010LT when you re-enter Windows. After returning to Windows, follow the steps outlined in the "Verifying Windows Driver Installation" section of this manual. It might take more than one PCI slot relocation to find an open IRQ.