Seeing as how I'm a computer science major... I'm going to try to not look stupid.

My computer has always done this thing where if I don't use it for a while it's as if my soundcard goes to sleep. My sound "chip" is a built in Ensoniq Sounblaster clone basically built into the motherboard of my Gateway. All of my power settings are turned to "always on" but I don't get why the sound would go to sleep.

The only way that I can make it come back is by playing a sound or an mp3.

Normally I wouldn't care about something this stupid, but I like to leave my Instant Messanger window open all the time and after a while, it stops making sounds when people sign on and off.

Any ideas?

well Brian...mine does the same thing... but I have no clue why I'm thinking maybe it is something stupid the company built into the soundcard?

Have you looked in the BIOS settings to see if there is anything that might be configured to cause this?

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Raydar - aka Steve

Black 88 Formula.
Red 88 Duke coupe. "The Project"
88 Formula parts car. "The Donor"

I'm assuming you have windows here go to control panel, click on the system icon, go into device manager, your sound card/onboard sound should be under the header sound,Video,game controllers, click on the plus sine, high light the object(s) in there one at a time and look in their properties. to see if you can disable this feature; oh yeah have a nice day and come back soon you hear

Could be in the power section of the bios the "wake" on interrupt 10 (usually the sound card) is not set to "on" or checked, Check to see if the bios setting for PNP OS is "yes" Sometimes if this is not set correctly the OS will not control the power to certain things.

Also check the sound cards Interrupt. set it to manual and change it to another available interrupt and see what happens.

and lastly check for white papers on the Gateway site. usually there will be some kind of report on a known issue like this.

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The difference between a user and a technician is, the user never reads the manual

Now hold on just a sec baldlobo! Civility? Being polite and friendly in OT? What's next? apologies and short & to the point replys? What's the world comin to?
Oh, allright then. Have a good one yourself.