[geeks] The Registry (?)

[Jon Gilbert]

At work we have these kiosks that are for customers to submit digital  
files to the photo lab in the back of our store. The kiosks are  
Windows 2000 and have Micro-ATX motherboards based on the old Socket  
475 Celeron, and they just die under the load of 12 megapixel files.  
(They were made back in the day when 4 megapixels was "alot.") But  
buying all new kiosks is cost prohibitive, so I decided to swap out  
the motherboards.

I'm using one kiosk as a guinea pig to see what would be involved in  
upgrading the motherboard. I was able to swap out the motherboard with  
a Biostar board with a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo. It booted fine, and I then  
installed all the new drivers. However the kiosk's software crashes  
due to the fact it cannot set the sound volume. I noticed that the  
previous motherboard's sound driver control panel was still there, so  
I did "Add/Remove Software" and got rid of it. Sound plays just fine  
out of the new sound port on the new motherboard, and all the stuff in  
the device manager and sound control panel looks kosher. However the  
crash still occurs.

I'm guessing that somewhere in the registry, some crap remains from  
the old sound drivers from the previous motherboard, but I have no  
idea about how go about fixing this. I remember reading online that  
there are programs that repair the registry... anybody know if that is  
the proper way to go about fixing this? (I'm pretty much a noob when  
it comes to Windows.) Or is the registry not where I should be looking  
to solve this problem?

I also thought perhaps that I need to update DirectX. Is it possible  
that the kiosk software (which relies on java and Shockwave from what  
I can tell) uses DirectX APIs to control things like system sound  
volume?

Thanks for any tips.

-j