I was using my PC last night (had it playing music when we got back from a parteh). When I'd finished with it, I hit the suspend button on my keyboard as I usually do, and it went down fine (it goes into suspend to ram, so is basicly off).
I turn it back on today. Start up winamp, hit play. Nothing.
Hmmmm.
Check the system volumes - all on max. Try and play stuff in media player. Nothing. Try the radio on my TV/radio card - its very very quiet. I cranked up the volume on the speakers and could JUST hear a very corrupted version of the MP3 in winamp playing.
I figured that maybe the card didn't come out of suspend properly, so I shut the machine down, waited a minute, turned it back on, and waited for windows to start.
Try again - same thing.
Reboot and choose Mandrake instead of windows this time.
Still the same thing - so that rules out drivers.
By now I was suspecting hardware failure, so I shut down, opened the case, and looked at the card without taking it out - there was no visable sign of anything up with it (burn marks etc) and nothing against it that was shorting it.
I connected a second pair of speakers to channel 2 (its an SB Live 5.1) and booted windows again - this time I got sound, but out of both channels - so both sets of speakers were working now.
Sure enough, MP3s pay, all is fine and dandy etc.
For 10 mins or so.
When it starts doing it again.
I noticed it did it just as the fans on my PSU powered up a bit more (its a thermostatically controlled jobby). Afaik, the PSU fans run off seperate channels to the one the motherboard uses, but even so I figured maybe there was a power shortage to the soundcard. So I waited 10 mins for everything to cool down again, and started back up (windows), muttering profanities to myself.
I waited for the temperature to get high enough for the PSU fans to power up a bit more, and it carried on working.
It is still working now, 20 minutes since I powered back up for the final time, and the temperature is way above where it was when the failure happened for the second time (60C proc, 33 mobo - pretty standard idle temps for this machine in this room) - so that must have been coincidence.
So as far as I can tell, I've ruled out visible power shorts, low power, speaker faults, driver failure, and visible hardware failure on the card.
That leaves some kind of hidden power short (in the PCI slots itself for example, if that's buggered) or some wierd intermittant hardware fault on the card.
Incidentally, the PSU is 400W (not a cheapo one either) and should be more than powerful enough for what its supplying, which is:
Athlon XP 2000+
Zalman Silent CPU cooler, fan @1500Rpm
2 Seagate Barracuda IV harddrives.
Leadtek TV/radio card
Standard 10/100 nic.
GeForce3 Ti200 64Mb
And the bloody soundblaster of course.
I've only listed the "always on" stuff there.
Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused it? I don't like the idea of a randomly working soundcard.