SigmaTel Sound Driver, Microphone and Vista. How do I fix them?
My current laptop is a nice Dell Inspiron 1720. For the most part, I’m pretty happy with it. There are a few things that still get my dander up, if you will, but I attribute most of them to Vista(Free up Disk Space, recognizing CD burner).
The recent issue has been my headset jack. For a long time, each time I plugged something in to the microphone jack I would get the prompt from Vista asking what type of device was being connected. I would always leave the “Never Ask” checkbox unchecked just so I would have the ability in the future to easily use some other device.
The problem started about 2 weeks ago. I believe (although I don’t know for sure) that I accidentally checked the aforementioned option. From that point on I was no longer able to get to that dialog, and in addition my microphone would not work with some applications. Windows would indicate that it was hooked up and the level meter in the properties dialog would move suggesting that it was working; however, in applications like recording software and games using voice chat I would get no sound at all.
Searching around Google it turned out that many other people have had the same problem. The disturbing thing was that there are a lot of solutions (see the links) that solve the problem for some and not the others.
I tried most of the suggestions that I found with no luck. The one that sounded like it should work involved a check box that tells the driver to reset all popup alerts. That was a no-go as well.
In the end, there was a comment that suggested that reinstalling the driver would do the trick. I downloaded the latest from Dell (which was the version I already had installed), went into Device Manager (Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager) including telling it to remove all files and rebooted. After doing so, Vista did detect my sound card and reinstalled the software. The next time I plugged in, viola! There was my dialog!
I don’t know if it is a Vista problem or a SigmaTel problem, but it is one that should be addressed. If you’ve found your way to this page and the reinstallation method does not work for you, try some of the other links from above. There are a lot of potential solutions, one of them may be right for you.
How to fix the Outlook To Do Bar stuck loading problem
Just the other day a co-worker of mine asked me if our Exchange Server was having problems. It was not so I asked why he was asking about that. It turned out that his To Do bar in Outlook was just a big gray box with the message “Loading” displayed. He had left it for literally hours, restarted Outlook and rebooted his machine all to no avail.
My previous experiences with Outlooks shortcuts and calendar lists disappearing popped to mind so I had him exit Outlook and rename his Outlook.XML file. Sure enough, it worked! When he restarted Outlook his To Do bar came back to life. He had to reset it to show the items he wanted, but everything has been fine since.
This is just another example of Outlook frequently corrupting a file it uses for UI settings. I still do not know why it seems to be so fragile. I have submitted my experiences to Microsoft but I do not know if there are any plans to make the process a little more robust. Given the importance of Outlook in today’s business world (for many companies at least) I hope that this issue will get the attention that it deserves. There are some in my company that are greatly affected by Outlook problems.
If you happen to see any weird Outlook UI issues, first thing to try, in my opinion, is renaming (and therefore rebuilding) the Outlook.XML. Good luck to all!
Are you wondering how to free up disk space after Vista SP1?
I suppose that I wasn’t looking that specifically after installing SP1 for Vista; however, it did seem like my disk space was dwindling faster than I thought it should have.
Just this morning I went through my installed programs list and removed some that I was no longer using. It did free up some space. Although I had plenty of space after this time I found an article from Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day. The title read “Don’t think you’ll need to uninstall Vista SP1? Want to recover up to a gig of drive space? Then check out the Vista SP1 File Removal Tool.“
At times I have to wonder what the odds are that the very thing I am doing or looking for shows up on someone’s blog post…but I digress.
Greg cited the post NicolBlog – “Window Vista SP1 File Removal Tool” AKA “how to recover disk space after Vista SP1 installation” . which described how to use the Windows Vista SP1 File Removal tool (Vsp1cln.exe). After reading about the tool and running the instructions, I reclaimed almost 1GB of space as Greg suggested. Thanks Greg!
How to use Windows Mobile Sync Center on Vista with F-Secure Client Security
We’ve been using F-Secure as our virus/malware protection in our company for a little over a year now. I have been and continue to be impressed with the product and the company support.
Recently I purchased my new laptop with Windows Vista installed. More recently I purchased a new HTC P4300 smartphone with Windows Mobile 5. It’s been working great, and I love the phone. The only weird issue has been syncing with the USB cable. In order to make it work I had to temporarily turn off the firewall inside of F-Secure Client Security. Syncing via Bluetooth was working fine so I tended to lean on that.
Today I decided it was time to fix the issue. I gave a call to the business support line at F-Secure, explained the problem quickly to the technician. She told me right off the bat that this was an issue she had no experience with, so she asked if I minded giving her a little time to investigate. Of course I said that was fine.
Within 30 minutes I had an email from her outlining the solution. My total phone time was about 5 minutes and then another 5 to put the fix into place. Thank you!
The problem is simply that the Sync Center in Vista uses some ports over the USB connection that are new enough not to be included as a standard. After adding the ports and making sure that one of the applications was allowed, everything worked great. Since I do not believe they have a technical article yet, I thought I would outline the solution here in case anyone else needs it.
Please note that these steps only work if your security policy allows you to edit a few things. If you are running in a corporate environment you may need to give these instructions to your network administrator to include in the corporate policies for your virus protection.
Step 1
The first thing to do is to get into the Client Security configuration screen where we’ll be doing most of the work. Right click on the F-Secure icon in your system tray and choose Open F-Secure Client Security. This will bring up the main window. You will want to choose the Internet Shield menu option on the left, then click on the Change link next to Application Control.
Step 2
Next you need to add the application that does the communication to the allowed list in Application Control. wmdHost.exe is the component that performs the actual communication requests. It is possible that this application may already be there, but if it is not, simply click Add it to include it in the list. If it is not in the list it should be found in C:\Windows\WindowsMobile\ If you do have to add the file, I’ve noticed that my Client Security software will default to the access level of prompt for a new application. The other bit that is odd is that it will not let me change it when I’m adding the file. I complete the addition to the list, then go back in to the details to modify it. At this point it will let me change the behavior to Allow.
Step 3
Finally you need to create a new service and add the necessary ports. There are 5 inbound and 1 outbound port necessary.
Start by switching to the Firewall configuration screen, then to the Services tab and add a new one. I simply called it Windows Mobile Sync Center. Make sure to choose the TCP protocol.
On the screen where you add, there are two areas for ports. They are termed Initiator ports and Responder ports. These map to inbound and outbound. Here are the correct settings:
Initiator (inbound) ports:
- 990
- 999
- 5678
- 5721
- 26675
Responder (outbound) ports:
- 5 679
Once you’ve made all of those configuration changes you are ready to give it a shot. Grab your Windows Mobile device and your USB cable and hook them up. You should get the Connected check box and see it synchronize as expected.
I hope that helps you out!
Vista Gadgets are cool!
Ok, so I was a Vista nay say-er. The truth is, there are still items that drive me nuts, but I’m getting by. There are some very nice things that Vista brings.
First, and perhaps one of the nicest, is the new hybrid sleep mode. Your laptop goes to sleep but does some intelligent writing of memory to the hard drive in the background. If the power gets low enough it will shut down as though you hibernated. Start-up is only slightly longer than waking from sleep. I like that.
Speaking of start-up, that process seems much nicer. Logging in also seems to become responsive much sooner than it did in XP. The programs that run on startup would appear to be given a slightly lower priority, but that is just my uneducated guess.
Gadgets! I love them! A colleague of mine and I talked recently about it so I took a screen-shot. It’s true that some of them are probably not necessary; however, they are cool! The gadget framework (based on IE7) seems to be fairly good on resource usage so I leave them running most of the time, even while playing Dungeon’s & Dragons Online. not bad! The only downside I’ve seen is that if there is a problem (like one of the battery monitors I tried) then it gets grumpy and closes. When it reopens it loses most of the saved data so you have to redo most of it. Not a big deal if you can track down the problem gadget and quit using it.
My favorite gadgets? Well, I love the Now Playing which integrates with Windows Media Player, WinAmp, foobar and more. WChannel is also nice for a weather forecast.
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