18th January 2002

Sound as a pound? Not always. When you install software on your system, your risk for resource contention increases. Program A configures your computer to work one way, and Program B comes in and clobbers those settings. Oy! It's enough to make you scream. Lockergnomie Jon Cverna was having problems with his sound card. It wasn't working! After many long hours of troubleshooting the situation, he finally figured out what went wrong. "In the Control Panel, there is an icon of a speaker for audio and multimedia settings. Under its Audio tab, there's a setting for a "preferred device," which gave me the choice of either "Modem #0 Line Playback" or "ESS Maestro." My sound card is the ESS Maestro. I noticed this setting had the first choice selected (my modem). I selected "ESS Maestro" and now the audio is back to normal. I must have accidentally changed that earlier." Again, not necessarily. For whatever reason, certain programs change system settings without letting you know first. If all is well after the installation, nobody complains. However, if a piece of software dorks up your environment, you might consider uninstalling it and finding an alternative.