My Laptop Problem has been Fixed

My laptop didn't come in a perfect condition at the time it was brought home. Somebody installed several programs in my laptop AND most of them proved to be useless or even troublesome. I can't mention those problems one by one, but the most annoying problem that I had been facing for the first 7 month of using this laptop was the sound driver problem.

 

My laptop didn't allow me to control the sound volume directly with my keyboard (using "fn" button and then page up or page down) but it required me to open the advanced volume control and change the Wave volume, not the master volume. If I changed the master volume, the actual volume would stay the same.

 

Another problem was I couldn't use my earphone safely because the sound didn't only come out from the earphone but also from the laptop's speaker. Why would I use an earphone if the sound came out of my laptop's speaker? Nonsense @_@

 

I tried to reinstall all available sound drivers that were compatible for my laptop, whether it was from the driver CD which came along with my laptop or downloaded from the Internet. The return value was null. The sound came out but I still couldn't control the volume. The earphone problem didn't get better in any way. Then I desperately downloaded the sound driver that was incompatible with my laptop's operating system (mine was XP SP2) and installed it. As you may have guessed, the sound didn't come out @_@

 

I gave up trying and wanted to ask my father to return the laptop and change it with another one. Before I said it to my father, I did several researches for the last time. Luckily I got the answer to my problem.

 

Just a couple of months ago, Microsoft released the Windows XP SP3. I didn't really notice this release BUT it turned out to be my angel. It has the bug-fix for my laptop's sound driver! :D

 

I directly went to Microsoft Innovation Center in my campus to obtain a genuine MSDNAA version XP SP3 ISO and burnt it to a CD. The next day I formatted my laptop and reinstalled my operating system with the new XP SP3. Tadaa! All bugs fixed. Well, not all but most of them.

 

This is how my desktop look like after it got formatted:

Click to view full size

 

I installed Rainmeter and Foobar2000. Rainmeter is what you see on the top-right corner of my desktop, while Foobar2000 is a better (well, better than iTunes and WinAmp) music player. I changed my CD drive-mount applications from Daemon Tools to Alcohol120%. I have retrieved most of my favorite applications such as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live, Adobe CS3, Foxit Reader, and several code editor tools.

 

(look! look! the rainmeter Fox girl is drooling lol)