Category: Geeks r Us
Hey I was wondering if anyone could help me with this. I have an XP my mother sent me and when I plugged in the speakers sound came out but it sounded real low. I checked all the volumes and they were all 100. I checked all the speaker settings. When I plug in headphones, they are loud but speakers aren't and I tried two sets. The ones she sent and ones I had just bought. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
I have never heard of such a thing in the 14 years that I've been using computers, but I'm wondering, do these speakers have to be plugged in, are they battery powered or do they simply work when you plug them in. If they're electric, perhaps they're not getting enough power from the place where they're plugged in. If they're battery -powered, then you might want to change the batteries. Also, do the headphones have any kind of volume booster on them? If so, try turning it off and seeing how it behaves or try another pair of headphones. See if, in control pannel, there are different options for audio playback. Perhaps, it's not set to the right sound card. Also, look and see if it's set to headphones or speakers. I've never seen that one affect anything but it might change the outcome on your machine. Finally, check the actual drivers on the machine and make sure that they match the sound card that's installed. Good luck and hope someone more knowledgible can help.
Oh no, thanks so much for your input. One set of speakers are power activated but the others aren't. The headphones don't have boosters on them and I checked all of the audio settings. I even went to advance where it has a list of all sorts of speakers in control pannel. I tried all of them and I also tried the multi-channel thing in XP. it didn't work. I am going to hook it up to the internet and update drivers, hopefully it'll come up with something. Thanks much.
It also may be the actual soundcard as well, allot of the onboard cards are notorious for being extremely flakey.
And don't even bother trying to get drivers from the windows update site, the ones they have are complete crap.
You may need to get a different card, as there may be ither a short in the hardware, and or you have corrupted drivers. The x-fi cards from creative labs are a nice series, but be sure to get the platinum version of any of them, because you will get unlimited free driver updates once you've registered the card. Also the installer cd that shipps with them is horrible with screen readers.
As an adendum to my last message, you can also get an external version of the x-fi card as well, but be sure to install the drivers from the cd that's included, rather than letting the new hardware wizard install them. This way you'll get native drivers associated with the card, rather than a generic set of drivers.