Vista

Here's the situation. I have an Acer Aspire 5102 laptop.

For audio, it doesn't work. There are clicks and pops on playback. Record is a disaster with huge gaps, delays and failure of the video display of level and waveform whilst recording.

I've re-installed several times (Acer's suggestion), removed all the graphics nonsense that comes with Vista and that makes the screen almost unusable, but there is no improvement.
The Acer site has a faq that says to install a later driver for the problem. I've downloaded this several times and tried to install it several times. Installation always fails. The problem does appear to be a combination of dud video drivers (it's an Ati Radeon Xpress 1100) and the large amount of eManagement software that Acer adds to the basic Vista install.

I was reasonably happy with the XP that I still use on the working machines. This laptop came with Media Center Edition, which had different codecs and was annoying in that video files that would play on XP would no longer play on MCedition, but was otherwise fairly OK.

The audio problems are different, but still there with external Vista enabled sound devices.

The basic Vista controls for audio - the things that replace the old Windows mixer - seem a complete mess, but I suppose I'll be able to program myself to accept them. I haven't actually found anything of value at all in Vista. It looks very pre-beta software.

So the purpose of this rant is to ask if anyone has audio working properly in Vista yet? My simple test is to take a 100 second wave file of tone, and play it for 100 secs in Media Player. It should play cleanly for 100 seconds.

Not sure where I stand in law, either. It took 3 months for the Vista upgrade DVD's to arrive, so the machine is way beyond the time I feel I can return to dump it on the retailer's counter.
--
Bill
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Vista
    ... combination of dud video drivers and the ... large amount of eManagement software that Acer adds to the basic Vista ... longer play on MCedition, ... The audio problems are different, but still there with external Vista ...
    (uk.comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: Windows Media Player wont play some DVDs
    ... When I try to play them on Windows Media Player (Vista), ... I wonder what software you used to make the DVDs? ... DVDs can use 2 types of audio on them - PCM or AC3 audio. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsmedia)
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  • Re: Mp3 and WMA File not playing correctley?
    ... The link Mike posted has 2 steps, the first being updating audio ... All I know is it seems to be Windows Media player based in the Vista ... They do play but then will suddenly stop and crackle and continue. ...
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  • Re: Meine Erfahrungen mit meinem Acer-Laptop
    ... Ich kaufe das Acer 9813WKMi: ... man nicht installieren, da eine Fehlermeldung sagt, das Microsoft-Produkt ... sei nicht kompatibel mit Vista. ... Nach einigen weiteren Tagen verabschiedet ...
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