Windows is Wonderful, Part 9486

Creative Speakers

1) I have no sound. I have had no sound for a day. I finally started looking into the problem about an hour ago, and I still have no sound.

About a week ago I thought I would install Google Desktop because of its' supposedly super ability to find things on the hard disk. Running Windows searches takes time, and I thought maybe this would help. I won't find out whether it will help of not, I did not get to try it out enough to find out before I decided to remove it. It definitely slowed my computer way down. And with this sound problem, I decided to pull it.

Computer started working faster, but still no sound. Go into the Windows troubleshooting section. "Speak into the microphone" it says. I don't have a mike. Next step. Speak into the mike and it will echo the sound through the speakers. What kind of stupidity is this? Just make a noise, any noise, but it won't do that, you must have a mike.

Somewhere in my reptilian brain I remember that the sound cable had come loose once before. I get a flashlight and crawl under my desk and look. Sound cable is fine. But wait, the green LED on the desktop speaker is out. What's up with that? Back under the desk. The power cable to the subwoofer is loose. Not a real solid connect. It just slides in, no click or snap involved. Plug it in, the LED comes on and we have sound!

But why didn't I notice the LED being out before? It is really bright now. Well, it's really bright when you are looking straight on at it, but turn the speaker a little bit and it dims to the point that it just blends into the background. The way things get shoved around on my desk, it's a miracle I can even see the front panel of the control speaker.

2) I don't know who is at fault for this next problem. Videos are clogging the internet. The videos I want to see all suffer from hiccups. The videos I don't care about play smoothly. I have watched all my preferred videos before. They should already be on my computer, they should not have to be downloaded again. Or is it that they are on my computer, and playing videos from the disk causes hiccups, but playing direct from the internet works smoothly?

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.