Bios access

A friend with a desktop PC discovered that by some weird key combination before boot, he could get into further bios screens and set timeouts for disk access etc.

I'm trying to find a way to switch off the Realtek device at the bios level on my AS 5536, with Phoenix bios. Is this possible?

 

Laptop BIOSes generally don't have advanced menus.

The realtek device could be a card reader or the sound card. Either could be disabled outside the BIOS - which are you trying to switch off and why ?

 

Well I wasn't going to ask this here as it's a bit specialised, but I'm trying to diagnose why the following happens:
I have 2 usb audio devices that provide asio as well as wdm driver interfaces, an Edirol and an M-Audio. They work fine into asio set audio apps like Adobe Audition and Reaper when tested with the Vista 32 that came with the machine.
When I put in an HD with Win7 64-bit Enterprise edition, and fire up an asio audio interface (which, of course, is supposed to bypass all the Microsoft audio system), recording and playback is impossible because of gross distortion and worse. But if I then fire up Control Panel, Sounds and select the recording tab, the sound cleans up and I can record and playback pretty well. If I disable all of the on-board Realtek inputs on the Microsoft Recording tab, the distortion returns, and I can playback or not playback by enabling and disabling the last Realtek input. If I disable the Realtek in Device Manger, it disappears from the recording tab and I then have distortion all the time. If I disable the usb audio's wdm interface which appears in the recording and playback tab, there is no change to the distortion scenario. When I say distortion, the Edirol reduces playback to a burble, the M-Audio buries the audio under showers of clicks and bangs.
I have all the Win7 64-bit drivers off the Acer site installed and have tried 3 different Realtek drivers. I've disabled Realtek and the other HD audio drivers in Device manager, and tried disabling almost everything else there, all to no avail.

I've asked on 6 forums, and found one person in the world with a similar setup to mine who has got this to work by installing Vista as opposed to Win 7 drivers in compatibility mode, but this didn't work here.

The Realtek audio IRQ is still detected even when it's switched off in Device manager, so I thought maybe the motherboard half of the HD Audio system was the culprit, hence the thought that switching off in bios might be a useful test.

It is ridiculous that changing tabs in a window stops a system's audio working, so I would be interested in any thoughts or ideas.

 

Windows 7 does audio very differently to previous operating systems - so I would have suggested compatibility mode but as you say you have tried it . . . hmmm

 

I've tried the 64-bit usb audio interface Vista drivers and Win 7 drivers in compatibility mode. I'm running the 90 day trial version of Win 7, and daren't format and reload it in case the trial gets truncated (as would happen with an Adobe trial, for example). This and lack of additional spare sata drives for the machine stops me popping in 32-bit Win 7 to try.

The M-Audio forums are full of people with similar sounding, but lesser, problems and few answers. I'm now concentrating testing on the Edirol as the person with the working system has a UA-4FX and I have a UA-3FX, which are very similar.

Meanwhile, back to ponder some more.