Compaq d530 upgrade to Windows 7; fixing "Multimedia Audio Controller" error (Solved) and installing leagacy video drivers

I have a Compaq d530s computer (SFF case) with a Pentium 4 CPU and like many I decided to upgrade my XP computer with Windows 7. The problem with such an endeavor is a lack of Win 7 drivers for legacy hardware; in my case a NVIDIA FX 5200 graphics card and a legacy ADI sound on board audio controller. As mentioned  I determined the audio chip on the motherboard was an ADI Soundmax AC97 (the usual with d530 computers). After installing Win 7 the Device Manager showed an unknown device(yellow question mark) named  "Multimedia Audio Controller", meaning there was no driver for the onboard audio chip.  I searched for a Win7/Vista driver for hours* until I found this driver (the key is to know the audio onboard chip number; in this case AC97)  , "ADI Soundmax AC97 Integrated Driver" at  https://adi-soundmax-ac97-driver.jaleco.com/download also known as the "SP44472" driver. I ran the driver program and bingo, I now have sound.

After hours of searching, I found drivers that worked for both. Although I tried numerous NVIDIA driver installers for win7 and Vista, They all failed, mostly because they could not identify my video card. However I did find one thread from NVIDIA that recommended the following; find XP drivers for your NVIDIA video card and load them. The result will be the program will load the XP drivers (175.19_geforce_winxp_32bit_english_whql), but the program will stop at some point to say you're using the wrong Windows OS or it could not find the hardware, or something similar, however the files will remain on your hard drive, in my case c:\NVIDIA. Next, go the Device Manager, d-click on the "Display adapter" and then d-click on the pnp generic driver that is currently installed. Click on the "Driver" tab, click on Update and chose, "Browse my computer for driver software" and click the "Browse" button at the end of the "Search for drivers in this location" pane. Browse to the location of the XP drivers and click "Next" at the bottom left of the "Update Drivers" window, and in the following window, choose to install the driver; it should load the driver and your video adapter will come alive.

* several websites recommended, first going into the bios and disabling the PCI "Intel Audi Device" (Advanced/PCI Device/Intel Audio Device), which is not present on the motherboard. Re-boot the computer, go to the Device Manager and  delete the "Multimedia Audio Controller" unknown device (yellow question mark). Once the "Multimedia Audio Controller" device is deleted, click on the action tab in the Device Manager, and choose to look for new hardware. I tried this, but the"Multimedia Audio Controller" device showed up again, however I left the the Intel Audio Device disabled. After I installed the correct drivers, I went back and enabled the Intel Audio Device just out of curiosity to see if it would affect the Soundmax drivers, but it did not. (but I went back and disabled it again to make sure the IRQ was available.

Hopefully this will help anyone still holding onto their d530 XP computer and upgrading it to Windows 7.

ADI SoundMax AC97 Integrated Source: https://adi-soundmax-ac97-driver.jaleco.com/download Source: https://adi-soundmax-ac97-driver.jaleco.com/downloadS