Vista Smacked down by headset

"[i]4 Which explains Quicktime, mp3 ... What do they have to do with Microsoft? I doubt you'll be able to play them in 5,years, let alone 20. Protection only makes it worse. Example: I have 2 PDA's - Microsoft's secure book format requires that you register the reader on them. Fine. But the newer of the 2 refuses to register because its an unsupported (Mobile 5) OS. Microsoft cant even make their reader work with their new OS. There are ways around their secure format, or I'd be more annoyed.[/i]"

I have a hard time believing you aren't aware of WMA and WMV formats (for instance). The reference to multimedia formats was only an example, too -- which means that you should be able to extend from there to encompass Microsoft's piss-poor legacy support for older MS Office file formats.

If the PC was purchased with VISTA on it then
the blame falls squarely on MS & the hardware manufacturer. A new preloaded PC should never blue screen by plugging in a microphone. In twenty years, I've never seen a PC blues screen by plugging in a microphone or speakers. Definitely a new LOW for the Redmond boys.

the only thing that comes to mind is: WOW! Wealth Of Waste!
I get the distinct feeling Microsoft is trying their best to deliver a bunch of crap, so that we all can waste our money (and patience for that mather)on the next 'new' OS of Windows. I'm still using XP Pro and it seems to hold up after a ton of servicepacks, hotfixes and updates. Maybe they should let Windows be build from scratch up by a group of Wizz-kids, hackers, crackers and viruswriters. At least they seem to know what the're doing!

I've used Ventrilo with no problems whatsoever and I don't get the annoying static that I did with Teamspeak. Don't be so quick to call Vista crap. Every OS out there has problems accomodating different programs --- especially if it's not written for a particular OS.

It's doubtful the O.S. would have any idea what was going on (depending on what info the BIOS was giving out)- only that there's something wrong. In most cases, halting the system would be sufficient to prevent damage, though it may or may not in this particular case. The headset is imaginary, and so is the problem. That BSOD is the warning that you speak of.

Most of the replies below have branched off the first reply, which was phrased as though you had said "no choice", which you did not. I think you're right, and Microsoft would be a more useful entity to the market if it offered, and continued to support, XP, 2000, possibly NT 4.0 -- the OSes I frequently see mentioned in discussions of the new version of Windows, with unneeded "improvements". Market forces do not require Microsoft to do that, though, which is the fault of the market.

We really don't know what exactly caused the BSOD. It could have been the driver (which may or may not have been written by MS, whether it was provided by them or not), the sound card might be faulty, the headset could be doing something funky, or it could be something completely unrelated. I've run across some wacky things that happened due to bad RAM. I have a broken Microcenter flash drive that freezes both XP and RedHat when it's inserted(but things return to normal when I remove it), and cycles power to a Macintosh G4 I tried. A bad piece of hardware can really make a machine behave funny.
As for the source of the drivers, in a later post, he said he tried the drivers from the manufacturers for the two audio interfaces in his system and had the same results. It would be interesting to see what hapened if the headset were plugged into a different machine. The problem is that there are so many variables and uncertainties that without taking some serious time to experiment, we shouldn't be assigning blame to anyone.

Zap. ESD goes to ground...on the way bits get changed and the next instruction executed is from some random memroy location. Presto instant BSOD.

Amen!

For geeks who love tinkering with hardware, or thrill to pushing hardware to it's limits in Extreme gaming - sure PCs or Unix boxes are great. But when I recommend Macs, I'm recommending them to the non-geek home user. email, web browsing, music, video, pictures... the simple stuff that most home users do. You just want to turn on your computer appliance and use it. They are sealed, so you can't tinker, and they do break, and are built with planned obsolescence in mind, like all appliances.

Incidentally, when you point out a 5 minute job taking 2 days, did you remove travel time? Or are you comparing apples and oranges for dramatic effect?

You want it both ways -- the OS recognizes that there's a problem that could damage the system, so it BSODs, but it's unable to determine that there's a problem that could damage the system, so it doesn't shut down.

. . . it's a bit like all the atoms in a playing card spontaneously rearranging themselves to change the the suit/value of the card. Sure, it's technically possible, but absurdly unlikely.

I consider "the market" identical to "the populace", meaning "the voters", thus "the massive body of corporate law in the US" is only an "externality" to the extent that it is created without our consent. We know this is happening, and have [b]some[/b] recourse. No solution has yet been implemented, but it is noteworthy that [b]the problem[/b] was implemented iteratively, and could be (HINT) [b]rolled back[/b] in similar fashion, by demanding that our representatives repeal laws that provide such privileges to corporations. The failure of the populace to understand this, and to act accordingly as citizens, is responsible for the dearth of good options experienced, by the same populace, in our roles as "the market". Government of the People, by the People, for the People, means some personal responsibility for one's role, or lack thereof, in the body of law that governs us.

You're using that analogy bass ackwards for the computer hardware vs. computer software argument.

HINT
automobile hardware: gas tank:: computer hardware: operating system.

Oh, sorry, that wasn't really a "hint", that was just the answer. I too don't have time for this crap.

1) Ok. Linux and Mac seem to do just fine with a plethora of drivers out there...why can't MS?

2) What does that have to do with the price of beans in China? Nobody is talking about crash proof software

3) It has been created, it's called Linux. Not only does it gracefully deal with issues, but it won't crash even if a driver borks things up. It's called modular architecture.

If you are curious, just look up my name and find my other posting...I'm sure I've rebutted your next statements multiple times.

Wow...I think you win the prize for most made up stuff!

yeh thats probs da best thing i red on ere,
n i must agree wiv ya there windows may not be perfect, i mean look there still fixin issues relating to xp, and thats been out for years, n yeh i really dont like microsoft but can ya play all the games on linux or mac. i dont think so, they are workin on an emulator though, coz microsoft are so tight, why dont they hire ppl that actually kno how to program, or better yet wait till at least most the bugs are fixed, not just so the operating system is stable wiv certain stuff, coz ppl are always gonna be tryin to see if one thing works wiv it, wat about the ppl that like to play around with the computer, n why not just upgrade windows xp n carry on with that, and make that "secure" so we dont have to use after market products to do the job, or just stop lyin to the public just to boost sales, seen the price of vista and now theres i think 4 versons to choose from, which was sort of weird whats gonna happen when the basic user buys the basic verson of vista and then decides 6 month when he/she learnt bit more that he/she want to do more, and have more control, the interface of vista ah now there just taking the piss, they should learn from the linux os and the mac but yeh as for operating systems they all have there good points, they all have there bad points, if ya like havin a variaty of software to choose from ya stuck wiv microsoft :( if ya wanna play all the gr8 games yah stuck wiv microsoft, but not stuck wiv vista :D idda wait a year or so till anyone gets it, i tried vista well me boss is good to me :D n i got it for free n now im back to windows xp, there aint half as many issues wiv it, not now anyway

i dint fink anyone read them, well ok i read one from some company but it was long so correction i glanst through it.

Edited

Message was edited by: beth.blakely@...

spyware n viruses lol id say dunt use virus scanners all i got is a firewall if sum1 hacks me pc or it gers a virus just stick in da recovery disk of me hard drive i only got music n stuff on it oh yeh n i mess about wiv home vids dat ger recorded on me cam :P n i use it for chat sumtimes i play games but if it nacks up i just make backup of save game sorted

"[i]I consider "the market" identical to "the populace", meaning 'the voters', thus 'the massive body of corporate law in the US' is only an 'externality' to the extent that it is created without our consent.[/i]"

That's a bit like saying slavery was okay in the early 1800s because voters allowed it to be legal. Anything that imposes restrictions on the market by means other than the economic (in otherwords, by external means) is, by definition, an externality -- and anything that violates rights is going to be resistant to elimination through exercise of rights.

and other careless errors in trivially easy tasks.

If the problem was a momentary zap creating some random instruction, wouldn't that instruction go away on reboot? I believe the poster said that rebooting failed until the mic was removed from the jack.

I'm guessing here but this sounds like something wrong with the driver and the driver may only be employed when the system detects a mic to be present. When the mic is not present, the OS would not access the mic driver, right?

"I consider "the market" identical to "the populace", meaning 'the voters', thus 'the massive body of corporate law in the US' is only an 'externality' to the extent that it is created without our consent."

[i]That's a bit like saying slavery was okay in the early 1800s because voters allowed it to be legal. Anything that imposes restrictions on the market by means other than the economic (in other words, by external means) is, by definition, an externality -- and anything that violates rights is going to be resistant to elimination through exercise of rights.[/i]

I'm going to have to reply from home, where I have the time to be appropriately careful, but for now, I'll just say that I strongly disagree because the market for x86-compatible computers has [b]much more[/b] say in these "externalities" (or could, if we exercised our rights more vigorously) than [b]slaves[/b] in pre-1860's Americas.

(was it only during a write operation?).

CP/M was often criticized for this problem and no modern OS would be allowed to show its metaphorical face if it fell victim to this problem.

If the OS cannot protect itself from its drivers then the OS was, indeed, smacked down by the issue.

I find it interesting food for thought that a lot of complaints about Windows are blamed on drivers bringing down the OS. This has been the case for a long time now, hasn't it? If the source code of the drivers or kernel were available for everybody to look at then these issues could be evaluated by a much larger community of folks that understand this type of issue far better than most of us would be able to do.

Barring that, shouldn't there be error handling code to intercept this type of thing?

They have tried to pay me for FREE software
and I accept pictures of dead Presidents on green paper . . No Problems accepting MONEY here . .

Did the microphone work before all this went down ? And did you plug it into the right hole ? My 8 channel sound card has lots of holes in it and I got to hit the little sound Icon and let it show me which one of the 8 holes to plug what into and I count over to the spot and plug away !. . . I got a mic which is really weak so I went to USB port Mic to get the sound . . It could be the Mic causing the problem or a setting in the sound card IRQ. .

I am working hard on the problem of NOT enough people have it installed . . I have a cheap computer for sale ( $80.00 ) made up of odds and ends and loaded one of the versions of Linux into it . . Runs great and has almost everything they want to do in it . .

Sorry, couldn't help but use that term... even if not exactly correctly :)

There are several different technologies of microphones available. The kind you mention (magnet/coil based) is, I believe, the more expensive and less frequently employed type. More frequently, if I remember correctly, is a piezo-electric type that varies the resistence in the line (with rest state being relatively higher resistence).

Maybe this might be a viable path to investigate since I don't think we currently know what type of mic is being used. Did this same mic work with an XP installation?

After all, it wouldn't be the first time a developer could remove "testing code" from (for instance) a driver simply because they were unaware of the need for keeping it.

Whatcha think?

[b]The sounds of a giggle, boo or applause for things the operator does during setup would be of help !. . . Or at least make it interesting [/b] My Phone works again means I can send nasty fax's to the J.O. in Washington DC again
and do they need it . .

I am guessing that was a joke right . . Or at least I hope so. . There are patches for it which will make it lock up and sit there, you must not have got them yet . . hehehe have fun !

What about the problem the guy had of BSOD when he plugged his mic in? Is that not hardware? And since drivers are installed deep in the OS if the driver has a flaw it can crash the OS because it has become a part of it.

I haven't seen that character around here much, so I'd call that one trash-talking post a small disservice, not a great one!

:^0

I wasn't receptive to what I was told about Linux, the first time I was told about it, partly because it sounded "too good to be true", and so I assumed it must be, and partly because if it did prove true, I would have had to feel, as you said very well, "a little on the stupid side" because I had just "payed all those bucks for an OS that does not function properly," not to mention the [b]time[/b] I had invested, to learn to [b]make it[/b] function adequately. Better late than never, but better early than late when it comes to Linux/GNU. I think the best time to tell Windows users about Linux is when they're considering buying the new Windows, not just after they did, which if I understand correctly was the main point you made.

"I consider "the market" identical to "the populace", meaning 'the voters', thus 'the massive body of corporate law in the US' is only an 'externality' to the extent that it is created without our consent."

[i]That's a bit like saying slavery was okay in the early 1800s because voters allowed it to be legal. Anything that imposes restrictions on the market by means other than the economic (in other words, by external means) is, by definition, an externality -- and anything that violates rights is going to be resistant to elimination through exercise of rights.[/i]

We differ on use of externality, which I should have Googled before using. The definitions I've found for "market externalities" all include the phrase "side effect", and do not have the implication I assumed, which was more limited to the common use of the word "external", as outside oneself and sphere of influence. I still maintain that these corporate laws we're discussing are not entirely beyond the power and responsibility of the units of the market, but certainly, as consumers of operating systems, we have less direct impact on those laws than those laws have on our array of options. Basically, I concede the point, and if the word "slavery" was hyperbole, it served the purpose of sending me off to look up the exact meaning of the word I parroted.

I'm not saying that vista is perfect, but it is not solely to blame for any problems. The problem is that unlike Apple, Microsoft and hardware manufacturers don't work in sync with each other. MacOS works so good because the OS and hardware are designed to work together, but being able to upgrade a component in the system is not as easy as with PC's. Because of this 'flexibility' It is hard for MS to produce an OS that will be completely stable. If Microsoft started to develop hardware as well, then their OS's will be stable like the MacOS. So the problem is not just Vista. It is Vista as well as the driver programmers as well as the hardware manufacturers. They are all to blame.

Obviously, plugging in the mic was somehow detected by the OS, which then [b]did something software-related[/b] to cause the BSOD. Hardware and software [b]do interact[/b] at some level.

Are you playing dumb?

I blame Vista like this: I already dislike Microsoft, since version 95, which was so unstable you could hear it clunk! Now, if I use Vista and something goes wrong, I blame Vista. It doesn't have to be a computer problem at all! Burned toast? Vista didn't install the non-existent toaster drivers, dammit! See? Easy as falling off a bike!
:^0

I'd love to blame Microsoft for hunger, war, disease and my spilled beer, but I could have told you that trying to operate two sound cards simultaneously on the same system is one of the most likely ways to bork something. Not that it can't be done, but it tends to be much more than twice as challenging as just running one sound card.

& this "freebie" as you call it cost him time.

Who got what who paid for?

The Operating system doesn't tell you, it is the driver/control set for the sound hardware from the Audio manufacturer that the MB manufacturer integrated.

Duh, really, are there any real people that write in here that know anything about how computers work or ?

Most crashes are usually due to drivers and the Realtek driver set has an issue that has been addressed by the Audio manufacturer and MS. Get your update, my copies of Vista automatically downloaded the update, why not yours?

the control panel of the audio system wrote to an area that actually caused the problem with which I believe is user32.dll.

Driver was okay and the fix was to remove the control panel. Manufacturer rewrote program to properly install without writing to improper area.

Problem gone. No problem, no foul, no harm, unless the person is not versed in how to research on issues.

But don't get me started on poorly written drivers for nVidia, managed to burn out a 7950 vc due to improperly written driver. Now that is a $300.00 ouch, but is going to manu for warrantee.

Happened with my unit, but removal of control panel for audio fix problem.

They said the dealer in Malaysia, not MS. Advice was given by typically uninformed sales people or low level techs.

Although I'm sure your SBLive5.1 is just as adequate as the day you bought it, because it isn't the current-generation (newest) from that brand, it's less likely to be included on the install disc, but since it's a major brand, it is likely to be included in the vast repository of Windows Updates.

See if you have the Vista install disc or the manufacturer restoration disc. There are tools available on the disc to do various repairs to a non starting system.

When you boot using the disc, the first screen that asks if you want to install Vista will have a link in the lower left hand corner to take you to repair utilities.

They have four different levels which increase in intrusiveness into the os to repair. The Manufacturer disc may be a little different but should have same utilities.

If you have the disc, let us know and we may take this offline not to interfere with the message board. If you do not have the disc, the original Vista OS disc can usually be requested from Dell or MS depending on the arrangement by Dell.

When the drive from nVidia hosed my system, these little gems worked great. Also, make sure that no other peripherals are hooked up to the notebook, as I had a fit trying to resolve a problem that was due to a second monitor being hooked up to the Video Card.

Uninformed claptrap remark.

it crashed. Because some bonehead wrote software went where it wasn't supposed to go. Not MS. The audio manufacturer thought they could do an XP type of thing and it caused people grief.

MS will verify the drivers, not the control panel applets the manufacturers decide to throw in as an after thought.

And no, nobody can prevent a BSOD on anything if someone is stupid enough to miswrite how something is installed into an OS, any OS.

. . . while I knew what I meant, I did a piss-poor job of explaining it, anyway. Let's just chalk up the entire experience to poor communication and call it a day.

If the driver is handled better by the OS, it can be prevented from crashing the system. Driver modules in Linux, for example, don't have that kind of ability to crash Linux systems in the same way. While it's true that a poorly written driver can crash the system no matter what OS it is, I've never seen any OS other than MS Windows with a driver that appeared to work perfectly for a while, then suddenly crashed the system.

To star this off, I will not profess to be an expert on anything. I will also admit that I have yet to use Vista, so I have no personal experience to pull from. But from the threads I've read on here and elsewhere about experiences with Vista, it sounds like Microsoft released a beta version product and called it finished.

I'll try to explain the way things look to me with an analogy about cars. Let's say Vista is the newest model of car from General Motors, and 2% of them suddenly burst into flames while driving down the highway 3 months after being purchased. That would be grounds for a massive recall to correct the problem, but with the software industry, we just say "It's not a perfect OS. All new software has bugs."

I'm sorry, but with the R&D capacity that Microsoft has at their disposal, and the time spent developing Vista, there shouldn't be so many problems happening. I'd expect buggy software from the open-source community, where most of the programmers are unpaid volunteers working in their spare time, but not from a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft. The only reason they aren't held to a higher standard is because of the market dominance they have achieved through cutthroat business tactics that have nearly squashed all competitors. Microsoft hasn't taken our choices away, but it have seriously limited the available choices and made it rather difficult to choose anything but its products.

My next computer will be a Mac. At least their software works nearly flawlessly with their hardware. Of course, they do have the benefit of only using a small subset of all the hardware available. Perhaps the downfall of the Windows PC is the same freedom of choice in hardware that enables users to have a choice and not be stuck with what one manufacturer decides to use.

Okay, I'm done with my rant now. Flame me all you want. I've simply stated my opinion, and I make no claims of it being any better or worse than anyone elses.

But then again, what qualifies you to make that statement?

The stipulation in your End User License Agreement that Microsoft software is not fit for "mission-critical applications" ought to dissuade you from taking it on the analog of a highway in the first place. Instead, you are told, right after opening your software, that what you have purchased with your hard-earned money is analogous to a go-cart. Stalling periodically is still a malfunction, and still good reason to buy a different brand of analogous go-cart, but Microsoft never was good enough to drive on the analogous highway, and the analogy to cars that "burst into flames" overstates the importance of the malfunction, as well as the maximum possible utility offered by Windows; even if it did not periodically stall for no reason, it just was never as good as the highway driving analogy implicitly gives it credit for!

Owww look at me, I'm making people Happy! I'm the magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane!!!!

"The headset is imaginary, and so is the problem."

So, just imagine it works, et voila!

[i]For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.[/i]

Not so much. BSOD are mostly preventable. The reason they occur is because:

A) MS OSs are not modular
B) MS OSs allow drivers to float between user and kernel space and they can kind of do what they want
C) User32.dll is the a kludge of a mess
D) Ditto for Kernel32.dll

So basically what all this means is that MS has built in problems because they allow bad things to happen rather than gracefully stopping or mitigating them....a BSOD is not graceful or a good way to mitigate serious errors.

I point you to a great introductory book on OSs (by Tannenbaum the inventor of Minix) http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Implementation-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0136374069

You have the day off, don't you? Or was that just caffeine induced? :)

Homer is the MAN...

I've never had occasion to look into multiple sound devices in FreeBSD, so I don't know first-hand how easy (or difficult) setting it up for that purpose would be. Judging by the fact that configuring sound on FreeBSD is actually much easier, in my experience, than on any Linux distribution, I'd have to guess that using multiple sound adapters would be easier on FreeBSD as well.

I ran across something that discussed multiple sound devices on a FreeBSD machine a while back, and I seem to recall that it looked pretty damned easy, but I haven't tried it myself -- so I can't really vouch for its ease personally.

That wasn't obtuse, it was just on the opposite side of orthogonal from the previous acute observation!

:^0

[TR: please add 'barf' emoticon, a crucial element in any site's repertoire of silly faces. thanks!]

I've always compiled a CD (now dvd) of new drivers (with multiple versions) prior to any new OS installation. I also, as a rule, never install any manufacturer/3rd party written hardware management tools for video cards, sound cards and motherboards because they're usually badly coded pieces of junk that cause more bloat than they're worth. And it would seem that some optional (or perhaps non-optional, in that it was part of the driver installation package) sound card management software was the cause of the OP's BSOD, in that it detected a device was plugged into the input on his soundcard and queried what device it was (as was suggested in an earlier post).

It's been my experience that these manufacturer/3rd party written management programs cause oodles of OS problems, and are completely unnessecary because pretty much anything they do can be handled by Windows control panel (with the exception of things like EAX for SB cards, which are merely useless bells and whistles).

So if given the option to install the Super Whizbang Control Panel X-omatic 2000! (adding 2000 and an exclamation mark to ANYTHING makes it better!), just say no! =P

The original post claimed that when he went to set up his headset/mic to work with an application, he plugged it in and it bluescreened. Second he stated that it didn't stop until he removed it.

The area that needed to be looked at, considering it was probably using HD Audio and jack sensing, would be the application that reconfigured the path for the audio/voice to travel since it is all not controlled mechanicallly but through reconfiguration by software.

If the sound worked before he plugged it in, and did not blue screen, that means that something other than the driver caused the problem. Therefore, the offender would probably found in the application that caused the switching and that it could be misrouted or when jack sensing was invoked the execution infringed improperly on the OS.

Yeah, I got the point that only Windows machine do the BSOD, and that it isn't "elegant" but have you ever tried to free up a Mac when it locked? How elegant is that. At least with Vista it is now "more" capable of recovering from a lot of crashes, but not perfect.

I think!

I have a second computer I use for testing out stuff in . . BUT its not WINDOWS ! Its UBUNTU LINUX ! . . . And I load things like Printers which people say it will not work . . TA DAAA ! it works ! . . OLD Epson C40UX works took a bit of time for the drivers part to load the correct driver and install it but the Printer Prints like a scalded cat . . I made it print the same 26 point letters in 4 corners of the same page in Open source Word Processing its was something like this qwetcxv in 26 point ! So I send it home with them and write down the link to the Page where they need to go download the DRIVERS for Windows plus install it and every body is happy . . I hope ! ( old Computer is a 900 megahertz with 756 megs of PC-133 ram )

Linux of those versions are easier
I have installed stuff in a computer and even during installation it found everything and made it work . . Then just doing things like plugging in a thumb drive and blip its there on the screen and asking me if I want to open the files . . Or plugging in a USB port extra drive click and its on the screen change speakers and its there what ever you change its there in seconds . . I made a OLD EPSON C40UX printer work when some one else said it does not work for them took a bit of time for Linux to sort out driver for it but it loaded and the printer works ! Printed out the stuff I typed on the OPEN SOURCE Word Processing in 26 point something like qwrg ;bvmasnd in all four corners of the page just to test it out and not waste gobs of paper . .

The rarity of "locking up" or crashing in any sense occurring for a unixlike OS is staggering, especially in comparison with the relative frequency on MS Windows systems. Part of the reason for this is that unixlike systems don't integrate everything under the sun into a single, inseparable whole. If some piece of software on the system craps out -- crashes, "locks up", whatever -- if it comes to that you can generally switch to a TTY console and kill the offending process without affecting the rest of the system. If that's not possible for some reason, and your system is on a network, you can almost certainly do so by accessing the system remotely with SSH.

That's simply not an option for MS Windows, where there is no TTY console because the core operating system includes the GUI, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop is a GUI-based tool that depends on a chain of applications that tends to include whatever "locked up" or crashed.

Simply put, [b]there are better ways to do it than MS Windows does it[/b].

I have you beat. It took me 30 minutes to break Vista. However, it also took about that time to break openSuse 10.2 and Fedora 7 test 4. The time it takes to break a system depends on the kind of user you are. A power user will break the OS faster than a standard user and a beginner will break the OS faster than a standard user because they do not know what to do or not to do. A power user will try things that a sane user will not. A standard user just uses the computer and the software in the way the code was written.

My complaint with Vista is that it broke every piece of software that I had, except Office 2003. I also have the standard complaints about the UAC, which I am not dumb enough to turn it off because it saved me once.

But Vista does have problems, one of the more serious ones is a memory leak. I installed the OS and nothing more and let it idle 2 days. The RAM used crept in that time from 39% of 2 gigs to 69%. MS asserted that it must be the programs also installed that cause the leak; this was after I told them that only the OS was installed.

C is a very powerful language, but with power comes the responsibility to use it correctly. Think C is bad, try Assembly. I use it all the time and prefer both to Java.

by a bunch of wizz-kids, hackers,crackers and virus writters. Does name Linus Torvalds ring any bells?

you will be using an OS developed by a bunch of people in their free time and by a bunch of University professors. Max OS X is a Mach III distribution of Linux with BSD extensions. The source code is available on project Darwin.

The government is not the only ones that refuse to use Vista. But in many cases it is not it is not the OS fault. Put Vista behind a Linux firewall and record the incoming an outgoing traffic. Vista was built with advise and some help from the NSA, NSC, and justice departments. Think your data is secure, check those logs.

I found the answer, but for some reason I just cannot see sharing my knowledge with those who would rather point fingers and not bother researching the solution for themselves.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

i have been using vista since beta 1 and have never hadit bsd. obviously that doesn't mean it couldn't, but i does make me wonder about your set-up, both hardware andwhat else you have done to it. presently i am using retail ultimate, both 32 & 64, and had no trouble installing a bluetooth dongle and then a jabra 500 headset, to then tryout the voice options. maybe you need to look between the chair and the keyboard for your problem or maybe it's the builder you need to ask.

What if they are tall and it ran into them ?
Like smacked them about the head . .

Am I amazing or what? Eh?

Its why I ask about the mic and if they had used it in another computer before . . to me it sounds like a shorted Mic or a bad cord shorted some place . . But I guess you men never listen to ladies as per normal you keep on pushing the same button and expect something different Its like one of my clients whom wants to add a different driver to a modem than what supposed to be there So I quit bothering to remove it and make it right so the computer runs good . . Its his computer So let him scream its not working and let him find the problem and fix it . . Takes me like 15 minutes to fix it, when he gets tired of playing like he knows something (maybe DOS he knew something) but in XP forget it !

The 'C' language was developed as the native language of Unix (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)), and there's gobs of C code in all the modern OS's and their applications, especially as you get "close to the metal," or at the level where the OS and the hardware interact.

The C language gives the developer complete control over bit-level operations, and it's therefor possible to create, using C, an application which is elegant and efficient or a ghastly mess - or anything in between.

It's the person(s) coding and testing the applications, not the language, that's the problem.

Add in the market forces that demand ever-more-glorious UI's and applications, RIGHT F*CKING NOW, and the likelihood that some of them will suck gets pretty high.

Is why this happened if it is true?

I have never had this problem or heard of it happening before
It could be simply a hardware problem

Could happen because the microphone socket has ground and power
This could show a power problem on the sound device or main board or power supply units
Which would be no fault of vista

But it may show that vista has a problem if a device fails partly or completely

Could be interesting to she if it happened with Windows XP or a Linux distro