Re: The story of my life (fix one thing and another breaks)

"MoParMaN" <scott.hendryx.clothes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Bill Hileman" <discgolfdad@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Dave Withrow" <bbeeggoonnee@@qq..ccoomm> wrote in message
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"Bill Hileman" <discgolfdad@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
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"MoParMaN" <scott.hendryx.clothes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Bill Hileman" <discgolfdad@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Burned the midnight oil last night working on my boys' laptops.

As Scott and others (elsewhere) mentioned, the dark-labelled O/S DVD
from Dell was indeed the "upgrade" disk. It took three hours on
each machine to "upgrade" the O/S, and another two hours per machine
to download and install 50 MS updates (about 93 MB), so clearly the
windows update problem no longer exists, yay!

However, in the process, it has somehow disabled sound on both
machines. Device manager says both machines have working sound
systems installed, but the sound control icon has a nice little red
"x" on it, and the tooltips say "no device detected."

Yay.

So I went from being concerned that no updates were ever being
installed (which the kids could give two hoots about) to their sound
not working (which means they're gonna be pissed at "computer dad."

I'd better get cracking...

You will need the correct sound drivers for your PC. It should be on
the other CD called Drivers and Diagnostics (I think)

I'll give that a shot. Strange in that it -thinks- it has the right
driver in the device manager. I even had it try to update the driver.

My last problem (after that) is that both machines refuse to keep the
firewall up. We're using Windows Live OneCare which has its own
firewall. Vista recognizes that both its own and WLOC exist, and
turning-on the service works, but only for about a minute or so, then
it turns itself back off. So far, WLOC's help (on-line even) hasn't
been much help. This problem existed before the upgrade, so I'm
pretty sure the upgrade had nothing to do with it.

My Vista does the same thing, WLOC turns off the built in firewall. I
think thats by design.

That part is, but it can't enable it's OWN firewall, either.

I've spent several hours on this today, and I've finally given up (for
today, anyway).

Likewise with the audio issue. I've tried everything I can think of.
Installing the drivers from the DVD didn't help. Going directly to
Dell's site and installing the drivers from there didn't help. There's
even a knowledge base entry for the audio issue that says "After
installation of O/S and restart, audio does not work, and will be shown
as disabled in the system tray." Their solution? Go to device manager
and re-enable the device. Only... it's not disabled there. In fact, it
says "working properly."

WLOC has that button to "fix" the firewall problem, and like I said, it
does. For all of about two minutes. Then it goes right out again.
So... I use the log option, even tell it to do detail on the firewall in
the log. View the log, and the firewall section is the ONLY section of
the log that's completely empty.

I'm really starting to think that Vista was made to prepare people for
Hell.

The the Dell installation of windows is like it normally is, then your
drivers were installed with the os. See if there isn't a director called
Dell under C:

Remove all the old audio drivers, all of them. The reboot and let windows
find them, when it ask you where to find the drivers, point it to
C:\Dell\.

If that doesn't work, send me the service tag number from the laptop and I
can tell you exactly what you have.

I figured it might not work, but I gave it a shot anyway. I had already
removed the device and auto-scanned for it, but not by rebooting. When you
try it that way, it does "detect new hardware" but it does not appear to
allow any intervention (there's only a close button) and locates the drivers
itself and installs it. After it was done, it reboots again, and still no
sound.

I used their support program and went directly to the 1501 support web page,
and noticed that there are only apparently two kinds of audio devices, one
of which was a sound blaster, the other was the one (sigma, I think) that
our laptops seem to think it has, so I had d/l and installed the sigma stuff
direclty from there, but that didn't work either.

For whatever it's worth, the service tag is JRG4PC1 (or I - can't read my
own writing).

My kids like to watch various anime videos on the net since we don't have
cable or anything, so it has to be torture for them to have no sound, but so
far they're not giving me any grief over all this. They were playing a
multi-player game called Trickster, but mom and I discovered that it's
apparently interactive with others in the game. Our kids were chatting with
other players. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but considering my kids
are as they are, this was not acceptable. I uninstalled the game from both
machines, and boy were they pissed about that.

Fortunately for me, they don't seem to hold grudges for very long.


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