It's Getting Quiet Around Here....

This week, I was using my desktop, and I noticed that there was no audio when I went to play a file. I went on to check a few things. I first verified that the speakers were on, and the volume was cranked up. Next, I made sure they were plugged into the audio jack on the rear of the computer. Finding all in place, I then went into the onboard sound driver, for the integrated audio, and checked that it was set correctly. Now I started to scratch my head.

A few years back, the onboard audio of one of my desktops had spontaneously gone, and I never could get it to work again. So, I thought the same thing had happened again. My work around that time had been to use a PCI sound card and disable the onboard audio chip which wasn't working anyway. I was wondering if this might be the occasion to upgrade to a Creative X-Fi sound card, and what they were going for these days.

Hold onto that credit card. I decided to check on one more thing. I went into the Windows XP audio settings. For whatever unknown reason, something decided to mute the audio on my sound chip. Why? I'll never know. I had only turned the computer on that day, and only done some web surfing, and not even used any serious programs.

The proof of concept is that it hasn't happened previously, and so far (cross my fingers) it hasn't happened again. One more Windows "feature" that I could live without. If my onboard audio driver (Realtek) is handling things, then Windows should just butt out.

--Jonas