Really stupid Windows 7 mistake?

It’s in Beta testing for a reason. I can’t imagine it’s perfected yet. Just report your problems to Microsoft so they can resolve them before the release date. There should be some sort of feedback that you can give to Microsoft.

As far as a fix…you can’t really update your drivers since manufacturers aren’t going to list drivers for Win7 yet. So for the moment it may seem as though your stuck restarting your computer. Must be some weird glitch or something.

I guess you could try installing a different sound card. You should be able to simply just “enable this device” to at least set it back to the way it was.

No, once I disabled the device, I can’t restart it to get sound back. I disabled, and now I’ve got no sound, and the computer doesn’t find the speakers even when I tell it to search for devices.

And yes, the “enable this device” is what I’m asking about. I don’t know where it is/how to find it. I guess my main problem is that I don’t know where to find said device, so that I can enable it. It just doesn’t show up. And on XP you could look at every port on the computer to see what was attached. I don’t see where you can do this on Win7.

Go to your Control panel, System, Device Manager, go down that list to the Sound and game controllers part….one of those should be disabled if it is actually disabled. Right click on it and click enable this device.

It’s not there. I have two “high definition audio devices” listed, but they aren’t what I’m looking for. If I go through to view devices I find that those hidef devices are hdmi ports on my monitor (which coincidentally, I don’t even have).

I think I might be screwed. I think I might have to reinstall it. And I think I’m going to kill myself. I’ve been using linux for the past two years, so realistically I’ve been kind of in a backwater of hideous (but useful, generally), copy cat, and lacking apps. Now I get Win7, freaking love it, way way more than Vista, and now I can actually install programs I want.

I’ll be reading Lifehacker or something and they’ll point to a program and, yes, I can install it. I don’t have to look for that “linux only” link that is NEVER there. I can just go to the site, install that app, and be on my way.

Needless to say I’ve downloaded a ton of stuff. Nothing crazy, but linux ain’t got nothing on these apps. If only cause they don’t look like they came from 1998.

So what I’m saying is, if worse came to worse, I could just reinstall. But I’ve done a lot of work to get this thang set up, and I really don’t want to have to do it again.

Go download a new audio driver. That might help. Or if you really want to try and get a new sound card. Or if you have a desktop with a dedicated sound card, pull it out restart and then put it back in. Restart again and see if that helped.

Download the program AIDA32, it’s in a zip. Extract and run and find the name of your audio device, search Google for the device drivers and see what happens when you install them.