IBM ThinkPad R50e with Windows 98 - No Audio

[karl80038]

Greetings fellow Thinkpadders

I recently bought an IBM ThinkPad R50e (Type 1834-S5G) with the hopes of using it as a retro Windows 98 PC.
I installed Windows 98 Second Edition on it using the OEM installation disc. After the installation, I started installing all the necessary drivers and software, starting with the chipset driver followed by Video, Ethernet, Wireless, Modem and Audio drivers, BatteryMaximiser software, the ThinkPad Hotkey driver and the ThinkPad Utility - all of them ended up working fine after the installation and reboot - except for the audio driver. I tried two drivers: one of them being the newer WDM driver, found here https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/p ... a241ww.exe and the second one being the older VXD driver for the Windows 98 First Edition, found here http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... tp1g98.exe. The WDM driver didn't work at all - Windows 98 SE didn't recognize it at all, the VXD driver seems to work - Windows 98 recognizes it fully, going as far as displaying the volume icon in the right bottom of the taskbar. However I cannot hear any audio from the speakers . The speakers don't seem to be broken as it can still make beeps during the POST process and when I enable the Volume Up/Down alarm in the bios, it does make beeps when I increase or decrease the volume. I think the issue is related to the software. When I received the computer, it had Windows XP installed and under that OS, there weren't any audio problems - everything worked just fine. Has anyone else installed Windows 98 or Windows Me on an R50e? I'm curious, is the audio issue with WIndows 98 present on the T4x laptops( R5x and T4x series laptops seem to share most of the hardware). Is there any other driver for me to try? I would be thankful for any kind of advice.

Thanks for reading,
Karl

[Screamer]

I don't think that there is any other driver left for you to try, unfortunately.

I do have two questions for you though, is this a vanilla Windows 98 SE installation? Or, is this a Windows 98 SE installation with KernelEx? Also, does it have DirectX 7.0a installed?

[karl80038]

Thank you for the reply.
I managed to resolve the issue by changing all PCI IRQ resource values in the BIOS to 'Auto-Select' setting.
Now the audio works perfectly under Windows 98SE with the VXD driver
BTW, I'm running vanilla Windows98SE that's been patched with Autopatcher. KernelEx isn't installed.