jim said:
On Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:10:09 -0400, in
It's a guessing game. But aided by your good observation on the headphones.
I've suffered enough misery on my own cheap sound solutions, and
the things they do in the driver are not to be trusted
They can't just send the sound samples to the speakers,
without "playing" with them.
If you think you've had trouble so far, try and get some
3D games to sound right. On my current sound solution,
if I slip on headphones, the "separation" on the sound effects
is all wrong, even though the control panel knows I'm using
headphones and not speakers. My "solution" is to not use
headphones :-( What should happen, is the level of mixing
between left and right, is supposed to be different for speakers
versus headphones.
Paul
I spoke too soon!
My change in Audio properties -- Speaker Settings does not stick between
reboots. IOW, I set it to Desktop Stereo, reboot and i find it has become
5.1 surround again.
My thought is that, at boot, it reads a config file and changes the set up
based on that.
I know that everyone but me remembers the exact sequence and details of
the 500 things they did when they set up a system.
Trying to reconstruct the sequence of events, i am close to sure that this
is what happened:
Originally, from the OS itself, I had no sound at all.
I installed the CMI8738 driver, set it to 5.1 surround sound and had front
speakers active only. (And I figure at that time the config file [or
whatever] was written.)
I later installed the Xear 3D CD and had all speakers active.
If I was suggesting to someone what to do, I would say uninstall both and
then reinstall, but I am loathe to do that with so much experience of "if
only i could get back to where i started".
Any ideas?
jim
In my limited experience, uninstalling and reinstalling, hardly ever
fixes anything.
*******
Software consists of two parts.
(1) .exe files, .dll files, the "code" that makes the thing work.
(2) user preferences
On the *first* installation,
(2) let's give the user some nice default preferences.
On using the removal option in "Add/Remove"
(2) let's leave these preferences here, in case the user wants them later
On the *second* installation,
(2) Oh, goody! The user already has preferences in place. I will
not overwrite them, because I respect the user's good taste
in preferences.
Now, you can see that computers will "remember" a bad set of preferences
forever. The software lacks "please remove ever speck of this crap"
on a remove. The software lacks "please *overwrite* all of my old
settings - I want to forget about what happened the last time".
Since installers lack even basic common sense, we're left with
"computers we can't control".
This is how you'd go about fixing it.
a) Use regedit, while the software is in place. Perhaps you see some
registry entries with "XEARS" or "Cmedia" in the name. What you're
doing in this step, is analyzing how the installer/software writers
choose to label their settings. To get a better idea of what
"should be disappearing".
b) Run the uninstaller. Reboot. Go check regedit again. Are all the
"XEARS" or "Cmedia" entries gone ? OK, remove the ones that are
still there (taking careful note they're not in some system area
you could damage).
Now, why won't this recipe work ? Well, the damn software splatters
settings all over the place. For CMedia for example, there is
some "mixer" reg entry, that doesn't have CMedia in the name, and
it's actually key to preventing problems. I only located that
one, by using Process Monitor from Sysinternals, and tracking
it down like a dog. I had to scroll through 100,000 registry
transactions, to find it.
To really get some idea of how a software works, you would:
*) Install OS fresh. Capture registry files.
*) Install CMedia. Capture registry files after reboot.
*) Find a means of computing "registry differences" between the
two sets of captured files. (Perhaps convert registry file to
"text" and diff the text to spot the difference ?)
*) Install XEARS. Repeat computing differences, to see how
XEARS upsets CMedia or upsets the vanilla system (such as
screwing with that mixer setting).
You'd really be a little nutso, after doing all that.
There are third party tools, which automate that kind of tracking.
I don't own any and know nothing about them. You can see from
the algorithm description, such an approach is dangerous
(deleting the wrong thing, like a "registry cleaner" might).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSoft_Uninstaller
Some drivers, the authors of the drivers know what a bad job
they've done, and they offer a "driver cleaner" from their website.
Matrox, ATI, and Nvidia have had such things (either they wrote them,
or someone in the user community writes one). For example, I
might have used "Detonator Destroyer" back in the day, as a name
that comes to mind.
Some of the "remover" tools, work from knowledge the tool
developer determined in a lab setting. Which means the
tool is just working from a script. While that ZSoft example,
claims to compute diffs and work out for itself, what to do.
Such a tool, that computes diffs, has to be installed early
after the OS is installed, to have "good records" to work with.
I.e. Install the ZSoft before installing the video driver and
sound driver.
*******
If you think the CMedia software is bad, some of the Promise
software doesn't even come with an installer. And good luck
figuring out how to get rid of it. In that case, you open
the .INF file in the software folder provided, read the
commands in the .INF, to get some idea what you need to
remove or override. Pure hell.
For someone who is better at this stuff than I am, this is
no problem at all...
Paul
