Disable Microsoft Software Wavetable Synthesizer, My Music’s Cutting Out...

We recently encoun­tered a sys­tem that had an inter­mit­tent sound prob­lem. After run­ning for a few days, any music played would fade and recover repeat­edly. After research­ing the prob­lem, we started with a typ­i­cal round of updates to the usual sus­pects. Those being sound card dri­vers, codec’s, any media player soft­ware being uti­lized for play­back. At first this seemed to resolve the issue, but after just a few days, the prob­lem returned.

Not only was this a prob­lem with our media play­ers, but it was also effect­ing stream­ing online music. Our cur­rent favorite online music ser­vice is Last.Fm. After Pandora’s recent deci­sion to limit users free lis­ten­ing to 40 hrs a month.

So at this point we were able to elim­i­nate our browsers and media play­ers, as these were both up to date. The next thing to rule out was our hard­ware. This was sim­ple enough as the hard­ware is a home the­ater sys­tem that’s uti­lized by other devices, all of which never have an issue. By process of elim­i­na­tion were left with dri­vers and media enhance­ment software’s.

As it turns out there’s an enhance­ment loaded by win­dows, our ver­sion being “Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate 64 Bit”. That par­tic­u­lar enhance­ment goes by the name of “Microsoft Soft­ware Wavetable Syn­the­sizer”. When open­ing your sound prop­er­ties from the con­trol panel, you’ll typ­i­cally see 3 tabs across the top of the win­dow. These are, Play­back, Record­ing, and Sounds. You’ll more than likely be on the Sounds tab by default. If win­dows sounds drive you nuts, as they do us, this is a good oppor­tu­nity to dis­able them. Sim­ply choose “No Sounds” from the drop down on the sounds tab. In Vista you also have the option to load the startup sound separately.

Now select the “Play­back” tab, and dou­ble click the upper device, usu­ally called “Speak­ers”. If you’re not sure which device is your default play­back device, play some music and look for the device with active lev­els. Dou­ble click that device and nav­i­gate to the “Advanced” tab. If selected, uns­e­lect both boxes under “Exclu­sive Mode”. Don’t be tempted to increase your sam­ple rate on this tab. Typ­i­cally the defaults are opti­mal, and increas­ing them could lead to an exag­ger­a­tion of what we’re here to fix.

Keep in mind sys­tems will vary in these areas depend­ing on dri­vers, sys­tem setup, and so forth. So you’re set­tings may look slightly dif­fer­ent. Next choose the “Enhance­ments” tab. Dis­able every­thing on this tab, if possible.

Now restart you com­puter, and the issue should be resolved. We men­tion ear­lier in the arti­cle that as part of our diag­no­sis, we updat­ing sys­tem dri­vers and codec’s. In the long run, reg­u­lar updates will lead to a much more pos­i­tive com­put­ing expe­ri­ence, and will dras­ti­cally reduce the num­ber of errors you encounter. Let us know if this was help­ful by leav­ing a reply below. Happy com­put­ing.

Jan 07, 2010 | Computer Repair and Networks, Recommended Software, Web Browsers, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave A Comment »

Media Player Skips When My Browser Loads a Page..

I had this very same prob­lem with my brand new Microsoft Vista X64 machine. At first I though it was the fact that I was using the newest ver­sion of Fire­fox. But after a bit of research we came to the con­clu­sion that it wasn’t actu­ally the browser caus­ing the sys­tem lag, it was the audio codec. Most peo­ple are hav­ing this issue with Sig­ma­tel HD Audio Codec. In my case it was Real­tek HD Audio. Luck­ily for every­one read­ing this, the fix is quite simple.

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Jul 26, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows Vista | Leave A Comment »

UAA HD Audio Driver Missing, Can’t Update

This issues can be caused by an acci­den­tal unin­stall of the HD Audio dri­vers, or a bad install of the HD Audio dri­vers. Our fix is as follows.

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May 23, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows XP | Leave A Comment »

Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop, the display is blank but works when hooked up to an external monitor.

Here’s a ques­tion we recently received. My Toshiba Satel­lite 1800 lap­top dis­play is blank but it works when hooked up to an exter­nal mon­i­tor. There’s any num­ber of things that could cause this issue. So we’ll try to cover every­thing we think would cause this issue.

1. The first ques­tion we’d ask is, was the oper­at­ing sys­tem recently rein­stalled? If so do you have the cor­rect dri­vers installed for the system?

2. The sec­ond thing we would look at is the dis­play itself. While the screen may be blank it can still be dis­play­ing an image. Take a flash­light and shine it at an angle to the screen. If you can see the “shadow” of your screen, and your mouse mov­ing around, the prob­lem is most likely a LCD back­light prob­lem, or an LCD inverter prob­lem. If the back­light went out sud­denly, its typ­i­cally the inverter. If the light faded over time, its typ­i­cally the actual back­light. See­ing that an exter­nal mon­i­tor works, this is more than likely the answer to your problem.

3. If you can’t see a “shadow” of your dis­play and you haven’t taken your com­puter apart, and you haven’t rein­stalled your OS. Then it’s most likely not a dis­play issue. The next step is to diag­nose the video card. This is a lit­tle more in depth, but in most cases, if a video card is sus­pected to be the prob­lem, it should sim­ply be replaced. This doesn’t apply to all lap­tops. Most lap­top moth­er­boards use inte­grated video cards.

Hope­fully this was help­ful. If you have any fol­low up ques­tions, please feel free to ask.

Jan 11, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | Leave A Comment »

After I Uninstall Norton 360 I Can Ping Websites, But Not Browse The Web

I’ve never been a big fan of Nor­ton. Their prod­ucts always seem to slow sys­tems down, and seem to cause more prob­lems then they resolve. This sys­tem was no dif­fer­ent. Nor­ton 360 had been unin­stalled through add remove pro­grams. Nor­ton ended up leav­ing bits and pieces of itself all over the com­puter. Which left the machine in an unus­able state. Using a com­mand prompt we could ping google.com, which means DNS is ok. We then attempted to rebuild the Winsock, which again didn’t work. It was at this point we knew the prob­lem had to be Nor­ton. After a bit of google­ing we found “The Nor­ton Removal Tool” After we ran this lit­tle gem the com­puter restarted, and we were back in business.

After the repair we loaded on Avast Pro­fes­sional. Avast is an excel­lent anti-virus that’s uses far fewer resources than Nor­ton. We also rec­om­mend AVG anti-virus.

Nov 22, 2008 | Computer Repair and Networks | Leave A Comment »