Windows ME quirk??

[DavidsonicGuy]

Hey, folks,I used to stay with Win 98SE, and back up stuff and re-install from scratch about once a year. Last month I decided to try Win ME, partly because M$ is dropping Official support for 98SE on June 30th. So far, WinME with IE 5.5 SP2, has worked out pretty well on my machine, and the one annoying instability (an error when shutting down NetZero) seems to have fixed itself.However, there is one verrry annoying thing going on, that I can't seen to find a way to stop. Ever since I installed ME, I hear this constant - Tick, tick, tick, (pause), Tick, tick, tick, (pause), Tick, tick, tick, (pause)...... once per second, over and over, until I turn off the power button on my speakers. Every forth second, the tick is silent.Here is some hardware details; F.I.C. PA-2013 motherboard, Award Modular BIOS v.4.60PGA version 1.15JI36 displayed on boot-up, VIA APOLLO MVP3 support chipset. AMD K6/II at 506 MHz, 256 Mb Ram. Sound card is SoundBlaster 16 MK4171, and of course, Creative stopped supporting this card at least a couple of years ago, with no drivers being available on their website. Oh, and the Device Manager shows only one yellow circle with an exclamation point; on the Linksys PCI ethernet card I've got plugged in. WinME must not know about this ethernet card. I didn't find anything relevant in the last bootlog.txt file, other than WinME did start and load it's own Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play drivers.Anyone have any ideas as to why this Tick, tick, tick, sound is going on, and how I can put a stop to the blasted thing, once and for all?? (short of leaving the sound turned off, or maybe using a shotgun??)TIA,JD

[T_Downey]

First thing is you are going to want to try to resolve any device manager issues. Try visiting the Lynksys web site for a driver for your NIC with Windows ME. Next thing is to look for current or newer drivers for your sound card and Windows ME. You also might want to take a good look around for any possible sources of electromagnetic interference anywhere near the pc, keyboard, mouse or other peripherals. Honestly Windows ME is considered the "red headed step child" at Microsoft. I have a friend who is a programmer at Microsoft and I can tell you the words I used can be considered kind compared to his description. If you run your pc for long periods of time or open large files, you will experience a slow down occurring on your computer. It's because Windows ME has a memory leak in it and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in fixing it. If you have 256 meg of memory or greater I highly recommend Windows XP.