Vista Smacked down by headset

I had no trouble using a headset in Counter Strike. Once I swapped the audio output to the headphone/mic setting instead of speakers, it all went well. Even with parts swapping, all kinds of programs, and other fun stuff like that, I haven't bluscreened since I tried to replace default video drivers for nVidia with the betas from the site (not long after it came out, sometime in March I think).

have TRULY yet to see Vista "blow up in their faces". Count me amongst one of those "suckers". It's okay if you don't particularly like Vista or Microsoft that's cool. Really. No one expects you to. But you refering to those who choose to use Vista as "suckers" is very 8th grade.

I'm not surprised as EVERY version of Windows has had the same issues everytime a new version was released. So, it shouldn't be a surprise for anyone as Vista is new, it has had fixes, it will continue to have fixes and updates. It may well be the reason most reviewers giving reviews on Vista advised everyone to wait until SP1 came out. Vista is not a perfect OS, it shouldn't be considered as one. Regardless of who buys it or why, doesn't give you the right to be obnoxious nor condescending with your immature remarks as everyone has been a "sucker" at some point in their lives, you are no exception. If you don't like Windows, don't buy it or use it as it's not a perfect OS but it's not a piece of crap either. If you can, try and make some kind of constructive contribution to the forum even if it's constructive criticism.
To make these kind of adolescent posts only shows your questionable mentality and disrespect for people you don't know.

we are also trying vista and mostly of the time it is the old hardware to blame... for isntance a webcam etc.

I'm very curious as to when and at what point would you consider Vista is to blame ? No offense but do you actually believe NOBODY out there has any problems with Vista ? Now, consider this carefully, do you think you have used, tried or had the same computer, running the same hardware with the same software as everyone out there ? The point of these questions are to make you realize that just because YOU have had no problems doesn't mean you are qualified to know if Vista is to blame or not. So, try and refrain from making assumptions and telling us that we should blame something else as you DON'T
know anything about his system or what is to blame. Making guesses without facts just shows your ignorance. Not everyone has a problem with Vista nor was anything like that implied. I'm glad you have had no problems, I just wish everyone had the same experience as you have but then we all know Vista is not a perfect OS and is a long way from it.

Some of the computers I have made for people have Realtec sound card built in ! And I have seen the popup window come up with something like should the software see this when you plug or un plug or something like that ! And that was in Windows 2000 Pro . . And Linux ( Linspire 5.0 )

I think you are right as nothing is impossible but Vista shouldn't crash as a result of this as it should be more stable than that. I do believe the fixes and updates will be made to Vista but I also believe that these issues would have been avoided if people would read the reviews and take the advice of the reviewers on waiting until Vista's SP1 was available. If the United States government refuses to use Vista, it doesn't take a bolt of lightening to get me to consider the fact that there has to be a logical reason for it. I enjoyed reading your post as it suggests a real valid reason for this happening to him but it doesn't suggest why Vista allowed a non certified driver to be installed. Vista is supposed to be past these issues that XP had and every version previous had. Vista is supposed to be a stable, self monitoring OS or at least that is what Microsoft has led us to believe isn't it ? Maybe the way to avoid this is just to wait until they've made these fixes to ensure non compatible software and drivers are all refused by Vista.

A BSOD is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Voltage drops don't cause BSODs -- they cause things like sudden reboots. Excessively "helpful" drivers, however, can cause issues when attaching hardware like a set of headphones.

Dear mok611,

Most likely you didn't lose your data, it is still on the hard drive. There is a possibility that your data can be recovered by a professional that know the command line. And in some cases I have been able to recover data using a linux distribution called Knoppix. This is a fully loaded booted Operating System from the CD-Rom. Yes you heard me, this doesn't even require a hard drive to be installed to use Knoppix.

Your best bet, is to forget what MS said. They couldn't find themselve in broad daylight.

I hope this helps some.

Spacetack

That could be any number of problems, based on what you said. You could be suffering a hardware failure, there could be Windows Registry corruption due to long use with lots of installation and uninstallation of software, some kind of malware could have been introduced to the system (like a virus, worm, et cetera), and so on. In the case of malware, however, it's possible that you might be able to recover the system without reformatting the hard drive, so I tend to guess the people at Dell were full of crap and just didn't want to spend any real time on solving the problem.

Unfortunately, you haven't provided enough information for anyone here to really make an informed guess as to the nature of your problem. I suppose it's possible that Dell gave you good information, but if that's the case you must have given Dell more information than you've given us. Even if that's the case, though, you still have options for recovering your data, as spacetack pointed out.

When you have not even done a very simple check with the manufacturer of your hardware for Vista compliant drivers?

I mean, come on! Are you Techs or crybabies?

Most of the time drivers are not available. But if u r a good google searcher u might find one. I have a computer in my office whch i tried upgrading to Vista, later there was no sound at all. My computer is Vista compatible(Thats what HP said). I contacted HP to get those drivers for Vista...No go. Then i searched in google with the motherboard specifications, and there it was. Finally i got one driver which actually worked. So i learner a lesson. If u r upgrading the system make sure everything is ready for it, use microsoft website...upgrade advisor.

Just a couple of things to think about as we all go around slamming Vista - and I will preface this with - I have not upgraded to and am not using Vista yet. MS provides an operating system that is 'supposed' to interact nicely with hundreds of different pieces of hardware from different manufacturers. This is a very difficult exercise, at best, because of the variety of the hardware available. Only recently have hardware/component manufacturers starting providing 'unified' drivers and this is typically limited to video cards. This means that there is the expectation the any operating system will play nicely with every piece of hardware out there - possible in a completely static environment but the pc hardware is anything but static. New devices being introduced is almost a daily occurrence. Regarding older devices, much of the support for very old devices has been left in the hands of the original hardware manufacturers. You can't really blame MS if, for example, Creative doesn't want to bother with Vista drivers for the SB16 sound card (out of production for quite some time I believe).

If you want to look at other operating systems, let's start with the Apple operating systems. I will NOT disparage the MAC OS/X operating system. It is a very good operating system. However, Apple when it builds computers and the associated operating systems severely limits the hardware available, providing and supporting drivers for only the hardware that they sell. As an example, this means that the necessary support for video cards drops from supporting hundreds of devices to just a few.

LINUX is beginning to become a viable alternative on the desktop to any MS offering but this is only a recent accomplishment. Historically LINUX has been too complicated to use and administer for the average PC 'user'. Drivers for these operating systems had not been provided by manufacturers until recently, depending up the open source community to pony up the time & effort to support new hardware.

Just like when we went to your beloved XP some things needed drivers. The sound is created in software, it is not as simple as just plug it in and it should work, this ain't a friggen radio.

Maybe you are new at real tech; there is a succinct difference between being a tech and a modder.

Try this; download Everest Home free edition, find out what flavor of sound device you have, go to that website and get Vista capable drivers. If you don't see them, E-mial the tech support for them.

I will never understand why some folks want to be bleeding edge and have the very latest OS and things but want to blame the new software and cry that it does not work before they have taken reasonable steps to resolve the issue.

I'm not here to put Vista down or load it with praise as I'll leave that for the lovers and haters in this forum. You know or should know that Windows in every version has had initial start up problems with drivers, hardware and software. Countless reviews have advised to stay away from Vista until SP1 comes out for the very reasons you and others are having with it. Vista should not have loaded non certified drivers as this was something that Microsoft has had in place so either it works or it doesn't. Either way, the driver or hardware you tried to install and load has caused Vista to crash. For all intensive purposes, the driver is no different than a virus as the results are pretty much the same. If Vista was secure and it was supposed to refuse to load non compliance hardware or non certified drivers then who do you blame, yourself, Vista, your hardware, Microsoft or the company who made the microphone ? When one bellies up to the bar, plunks down his cash and takes a drink,
nobody is going to guarantee he'll like it.

It has a very good supply of drivers and will run a lot of your stuff out of the box . .
It a runs in memory till you decide to install it and you can see if the sound works as you like before you use it . . I have 2 Linux O/S's to check out before I figure out which I will suggest to people as an alternative to Windows O/S . .

It's an old Compaq headset. There is no driver software for it. If drivers of ANY kind were required for its operation then any version of windows would ask for software or at least say "new hardware has been installed" when you plug it in for the first time. This is not the case with this headset, and to clear up this issue for you regardless of whether or not the mic was installed the audio still did not work after a certain point. I cleared out all my audio devices (drivers and utilities) and installed both individually and then together fresh. Windows still did not recognize them as being there outside of the device manager.

Do yourself a favor and quit with the preconcieved judgements. You weren't here and as such cannot claim to know what steps I took to solve the issue (other than the fact that I just told you). Nobody likes a jerk, let alone one with an ego. If you can't offer "advice" to solve a problem, I suggest you keep your pie-hole shut.

Any questions?

It's a flippin piece of plastic with 2 speakers and a jack! Why BSOD the computer about it?!

This seems to be a catch 22 snag as it was my understanding that Microsoft required drivers to be certified or they wouldn't be loaded. If this is not the case, then why does Vista load some drivers and not others ? I mean Vista is supposed to be secure and not allow software to corrupt it's operating system. If a driver is able to corrupt Vista, then what is the difference between this driver and a virus ? Can't have it both ways, either it's secure or it's not ? Blame the driver, blame Vista or blame Microsoft for telling us it's secure ? Have your own thoughts but don't blame me for bringing this up as none of these issues were initiated by me, so give Vista some credit for turning blue.

If Vista is supposed to be so secure that
it will only load things it will support
and refuse to load things it won't support,
then why was this person able to load it
and hook it up in the first place. Vista
should have said then that it was not good
and not even try it. That is what M$ tells
us it is supposed to do.

Why on earth people keep buying this crappy
OS is beyond me. You load it, spend
hours every week making sure it doesn't get
malware, virus, spyware, etc and it still
doesn't do what it tells you it is supposed
to do. Then if you try anything out of
the ordinary it says you are doing
something illegal and you have to call for
a new license or a new registration or it
won't work at all. True case of S&M.

And then you love the beating you are
taking at that!

I am always amazed at people who demand someone else do something. If you don't like your OS choices then develop and market your own stable OS.

There are other options out there. Have you tried them out?

I haven't had problems like this microphone silliness with FreeBSD -- maybe that's the OS you need.

...of company #1. Macs are not bought by enough people, and Linux is not installed by enough people, to motivate Microsoft to offer a better product. They have no competition, thus no motivation to compete.

There are actually reasons for the way computer systems fail like this. The nature of certain errors are unrecoverable not because there's just no way to pick up the pieces, but often because it would be in the best interest of the system to not even try. Say for example that headset or some other peripheral was sending a little too much power back into the system. Windows could handle error after error and keep going. In doing so, it could lead to data corruption in RAM, then the hard disk. It could result in some other physical damage to the hardware, too. Sometimes it's best to just shrug and halt everything just to be safe- even though it's a big pain in the ass for the user.

Vista refuses to load some software and hardware as well as some drivers that aren't certified by Microsoft. Vista is supposed to be more secure than XP, I agree it is but if Vista allows itself to load software drivers that are capable of making it crash, then what is the difference between the driver, the software or a virus ? Vista decides what to allow, not allow and chooses the methods to which it's going to employ it. When this kind of event happens, it only shows that most of the reviewers reviewing Vista were correct. They advised us to wait until the bugs were out, the dust had settled and MS had released SP1. If you chose to ignore the advice, then live with what comes as every version of Windows has had the same issues with hardware, drivers and software which is what prompted Microsoft to come out with the certification of drivers. I admit that money was also a factor in it but regardless you can't make excuses unless of course you want to believe Vista is a perfect OS.

There is always a choice, there are many other O/S out there and some a lot better and free as far as I am concerned.
Download and try one of them out.

The last time I checked, you live in a free country. If you don't like Microsoft then don't but their products. Very simple.

Just what I was thinking. Often upgrades are not nearly as stable in performance as clean installs. I have been running VIsta Ultimate on a TOshiba Satellite for months now with no issues and I do a great of audio work and use voice recognition [Dragon] all the time. The specs of your machine config would seriously help us to help you without any judgements.
regards

I couldn't begin to count how many times I've paid for something and didn't get what I paid for. This is a cliche which has been misused too many times for too many reasons. Very little is free and we all pay for everything in some indirect way or fashion but you being a Quasar kid may not have lived long enough to discover that for yourself. Try and make some constructive commentary in your next post as it may be of some use to somebody.

"You either need to have the exact diver for your hardware, or it won't accept it."

That happens a lot with drivers (especially old ones) and is completely acceptable. But a BSOD? Vista should just "not accept it".

What is really strange is that Vista did not recognize my SBLive 5.1 sound card after a new install of Vista. However, it did recognize it and installed drivers from Windows Update. I have not tried connecting a mike to it.

On the other hand, Vista did nothing for me either on install or with Windows Update on my plain jane SBLive card in another PC. Weird...

I'll likely follow your lead as I like it when everything just works without a lot of ado about downloading, installing and wondering about what's causing a new found problem. I believe Mac's new OSx will be an OS that will have some real WOW with new ways of doing things with graphics. Apple has never really taken a back seat to any OS when it came to graphics, I expect it to go beyond Vista's present capabilities with Directx 10

I use my home PC for gaming, now lets ignore the fact that games are made for windows (I don't like windows either but a Mac is no PC alternative) which is a money issue (MS throwing money at publishers to use DirectX).

We have a marketing division in the company I work for that uses Mac's and I'm the admin for that division so I know what can go wrong with these machines. They are pretty much designed for the niche market of graphic designers and this is reflected in the limited amount of software available for them.

The Macintosh is really a poor platform for gaming or pretty much anything besides writing emails graphic design and browsing the web. Gaming tends to push hardware to their limits which has two effects that make Macintoshes really unsuitable, the first being that you cant upgrade the hardware yourself, the HD, Optical drive and processor are sealed. You also have no choice in what you can upgrade to, only what Apple allows. I am aware if you buy the AU$5000 Mac Pro you can open it like an ordinary PC, but I shouldn't have to spend AU$5000 for that feature.

The first being that Hardware breaks, this is a given no matter what platform you are using. The problem with this is that you cant change the hardware yourself in a Mac (specifically Imac), you need to send them to an authorised Apple service centre to be serviced with Authorised Apple parts. out of the 5 Mac's we've had in production, 3 have broken, 1 G3 had to be retired, one G4 Imac suffered a HDD failure and had sent away to be repaired (took 2 days for a 5 minute job) and another G4 Imac had a PSU blow up (wouldn't have happened if the user shut down his machine over the weekend like I told him to) this took 4 days to fix because the service centre had to order it in (there should have been a spare on the shelf). A PSU should take no more than 1 hour to install in a desktop PC and this includes the time needed to drive to the shop and buy one.

Mac's are quiet limited in what they can do and now are suject to moores law that same as Windows/Linux boxes. Also they are still more expensive, my gaming PC cost AU$1900 with no OS (AMD X2 6000, 2 GB Ram, Geforce 8800 GTS) a G5 Imac cost our company AU$2800 (Core 2 Duo 2 GHZ, 2 GB Ram, Radeon X1600) Without a warranty (I built my own gaming PC which doesn't have a warranty, I insist on being fair in this test). For AU$700 less I bought a PC with was more capable than a Mac.

How does an ESD cause a BSOD? Seriously. The BSOD is what happens when software reaches a conflict state -- in other words, it's like someone's idea of exception handling is to dump error information to STDOUT and hang the program. An ESD should not have that effect. I'm having a pretty difficult time imagining how that would even be a possible outcome of an ESD -- technically possible, but only in the same sense that all the atoms in a playing card at rest on a table spontaneously reorder themselves to change it from a jack of diamonds to a six of hearts.

So . . . how would an ESD lead to a BSOD?

By the way, drivers for some sound cards (the mic was presumably plugged into a sound card) are these days designed to detect voltage fluctuations that indicate the insertion of a peripheral jack into the corresponding socket on the sound card. The driver management software may then perform some automated function in a manner similar in effect to the way USB devices are auto-configured. If the OS has issues with handling this, [b]that[/b] might cause a BSOD.

You actually think faulty hardware can't BSOD Windows or cause a kernel panic or be the cause of an "sad Mac" screen???

I tend to reach even further back these days -- I prefer FreeBSD, built on a tradition of about forty years of Unix.

connecting a piece of hardware can cause the OS to crash indirectly. For example if the PSU can't handle the extra load, it can make the system unstable and the OS can crash. I can also make non OS programs crash. I'm not say that it is the hardware's fault, but to just blame the software is narrow minded. The software relies on the hardware, if that fails, the software fails.

If you fill your car with crap petrol the car wont start or runs poorly. I dont see people blaming Ford. Thats my point. Look outside the square.