This is something pretty tedious, but for some reason, it has plagued every windows 98 installation that I've ever done. Everytime I bootup my computer with 98SE, the windows boot sound when it loads to the desktop is incredibly laggy. The file being played is "The Microsoft Sound.wav." I've gone into msconfig and disable as many startup processes as I possibly can, with no results. For a Win98SE computer, my computer is REALLY high end, so I'm sure it's not lagging up because my computer's too slow. On another note, I have an old Dell XPS T-500, built back in 1999, that plays the boot sound flawlessly. I know this is kind of a tedious problem, but to be honest, it's annoying as hell! If this helps, these are my computer specs:

AMD Athlon XP 3000+

1GB DDR400

Abit NF7-S v2 Motherboard

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Maxtor ATA-133 60GB / Maxtor ATA-133 120GB HDD's

Sony DVD-ROM / LG DVD-RW Optical Drives

Windows 98SE, unofficial service pack 2.02, all updates

Edited September 25, 200520 yr by Jlo555

I used to get something similar to this on one of my old machines.

It turned out to be a conflict due to IRQ assignments. Use the SystemInfo tool to check for "Shared resources" and "Hardware Conflicts". If your soundcard is on the same resources as something quite demanding (Your graphics card for example) it could be the cause. If so use the Device Manager to try to force one of them to adopt different settings.

While the music is playing, windows is trying to load other programs in your Startup group. You've got lots of good hardware there, but just one processor. The music has to time share with the other things going on, thus making it choppy.

Either disable the startup sounds all together or use something very short like ding or chime.

Cheers,

Andromeda43

Sorry I took so long to respond here. According to this thing, I have 4 separate IRQ conflicts right now. Is this normal or is something odd here. It appears that audio controller is conflicting with the SATA controller.

Edited September 29, 200520 yr by Jlo555

Sorry I took so long to respond here.  According to this thing, I have 4 separate IRQ conflicts right now.  Is this normal or is something odd here.  It appears that audio controller is conflicting with the SATA controller.

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Try putting the audigy card in another PCI slot. If you look into the motherboard manual you will see (somewhere in there) that the onboard sil3112 controller shares an IRQ with a specific PCI slot. Your audigy card is probably in that slot.

Does the same laggy startup sound occur if you use the onboard sound rather than the audigy?