Windows Vista problem

[Zrothum]

Trying to search around on the interweb for answers.

Just bought a new laptop w/ vista. Trying to set up speech to text. For some reason when I turn the volume all the way up on the microphone, vista automatically lowers the volume (too low) when I start talking.

I've hunted around in the audio settings in control panel and just can't find anything that looks helpful.

Anyone head of, or fixed, this issue??

[TheNewGuy]

The Microsoft crap... Eh, crop.

What do you expect?

(PS. This is NOT a bug. It is a feature. DS.)

[Zrothum]

I understand it's not a bug. It's a default feature that's not working the way I'd like it to. I can't find where to disable it at.

DS.

[Hegemon]

I'd suggest going back to XP. Vista is still too shaky, and until SP2, I won't touch it. XP is, more or less, standard now, and it's still decent.

However, I've been experimenting with Linux, and it actually detected more of my hardware out of the box on a LiveCD boot, that it "worked" better than any operating system I've encountered. Granted, it looked like crap, but you can always modify that with skins, settings, desktop backgrounds, whatever.

I'm considering splitting a partiton, and having the choice of booting up to either Linux or Windows at the boot screen, so I can still play and do everything that you will eventually have to go to windows to use.

Which isn't really that much, honestly. Mostly video games, and you can just switch back for that.

['tarako]

'what kinda linux do you use? i prefer pclinuxos.

[Mudder]

I just got a new laptop with windows Vista and I like it a lot.

...Though i've always had a hatred for windows XP.

[Hegemon]

I was using Ubuntu.

[BigMac]

I'm considering splitting a partiton, and having the choice of booting up to either Linux or Windows at the boot screen, so I can still play and do everything that you will eventually have to go to windows to use.

I bet you any amount of money that after a few weeks, it's going to lose it's novelty value and you're going to absolutely hate linux because it can't do what you want to do, and windows can. Then you'll be pissed because you have to choose windows every time you boot (or you'll have to learn enough about linux to modify the settings in GRUB)... then you won't want to back up all of your important pictures/documents/bs to completely format the drive and get rid of the horrible horrible things that linux has done to your machine, and you'll have sacrificed 10-20gb of storage that could otherwise be used to hold those .mpg's of Balinor's mom.

[EyeSeeU]

NICE!!!! He's in for SIX!!!

[Hegemon]

It's not the Dark Ages, anymore. Linux is real, it's here.

Barring that, Linux can read windows files. It's not a huge deal.

[zionpsyfer]

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that. What specifically are you talking about when you say that linux cannot do what windows can?

I have no issues playing the games I want to play (UT2K4, WOW, LOTRO), openoffice works flawlessly with word and excel files that I get from work regularly.

I haven't had to edit a GRUB configuration since 2003 or 2004.

Assuming that you found that linux wasn't your cup of tea, why would you need to backup your documents again before reverting the partition table back (You DID backup all your things before repartitioning in the first place, right?).

Lastly, livecds allow people to run a full blown distro without installing a single thing on their hard drives. Perfect for trying out something you may not want to settle on permanently. IIRC these have been around since 2005 or so.

Back to the original question, what program are you trying to use for the speech -> text? It may have AGC built into it and is doing this on its own. I know that Skype has some issues with its auto gain control in vista. When enabled it always sets the microphone volume to zero. The only workaround is to disable it.

I have to agree with Hegemon, XP is probably where you want to be (at least until SP1). I support a few people who run vista, and the driver issues along with general compatibility issues are a showstopper on numerous apps.

Then there are the scattered and unconfirmed reports of vista sending periodic reports to the DoD and others. I don't know if I believe it or not, others have tried it without results. but the WGA spying was enough to warrant distrust for MS. Then there is the DRM and automagic downsampling of audio and video when using any device in your system that isn't HDCP compliant.

Stick with XP for now and make life easier for yourself.

I bet you any amount of money that after a few weeks' date=' it's going to lose it's novelty value and you're going to absolutely hate linux because it can't do what you want to do, and windows can. Then you'll be pissed because you have to choose windows every time you boot (or you'll have to learn enough about linux to modify the settings in GRUB)... then you won't want to back up all of your important pictures/documents/bs to completely format the drive and get rid of the horrible horrible things that linux has done to your machine, and you'll have sacrificed 10-20gb of storage that could otherwise be used to hold those .mpg's of Balinor's mom.[/quote']

Edit: Hegemon: Not sure if you know of them, but... themes.freshmeat.org | gnomelook.org will give you some ui goodness.

[Zrothum]

Wanting to use word.

But w/ vista when I try to set up my microphone, i turn the mic all the way and start talking my way through the speech -> text setup and it automatically adjusts the mic volume when i start talking.

[Hegemon]

Yell louder? Look for some sort of override in the audio/microphone settings in the Vista Control Panel?

[BigMac]

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that. What specifically are you talking about when you say that linux cannot do what windows can?

- Run games natively without hacking/paying for third party programs to do so.

- Have stable drivers for most things (video and wlan in particular)

- Have definitive support systems. The linux world is so crowded with everybody's homebrewed distro that it's almost impossible to sort through the thousands of support forums and support sites to try to figure out how to do anything.

I have no issues playing the games I want to play (UT2K4, WOW, LOTRO), openoffice works flawlessly with word and excel files that I get from work regularly.

What program did you purchase/hack to be able to play games? As far as OpenOffice goes, I've had nothing but trouble trying to send documents from one platform to another and do cross-editing (e.g. I make an edit to a doc in linux, send it to my ms buddy and he edits it in winword, and then he sends it back to me and the formatting is just completely fubar).

I haven't had to edit a GRUB configuration since 2003 or 2004.

I have. They always default to your EXT3 partition.

Assuming that you found that linux wasn't your cup of tea, why would you need to backup your documents again before reverting the partition table back (You DID backup all your things before repartitioning in the first place, right?).

Semantics.

Lastly, livecds allow people to run a full blown distro without installing a single thing on their hard drives. Perfect for trying out something you may not want to settle on permanently. IIRC these have been around since 2005 or so.

Working for 6 hours to figure out how to get ndiswrapper to load the right drivers and then having to repeat the 5 minute process every time you reboot is pointless. Live CD's have their benefits, granted, but

I have to agree with Hegemon, XP is probably where you want to be (at least until SP1). I support a few people who run vista, and the driver issues along with general compatibility issues are a showstopper on numerous apps.

The driver support for Vista has drastically improved in the past six months. The main difficulties I've seen users run into are related to the UAC, which is actually a brilliant idea (that *nix has had in place for a long time). A lot of users actually get frustrated with it and end up disabling it, then they complain about security. Dumb.

Then there are the scattered and unconfirmed reports of vista sending periodic reports to the DoD and others. I don't know if I believe it or not, others have tried it without results. but the WGA spying was enough to warrant distrust for MS. Then there is the DRM and automagic downsampling of audio and video when using any device in your system that isn't HDCP compliant.

Conspiracy theories against software and fortune 500 companies are a dime a dozen. You mentioned Skype. If you run it in windows, do some searches and find some of the conspiracy theories that are out there regarding that program. A lot of them have quite a bit more evidence than the ones against Microsoft.

I agree that Linux has come a long way. I deal with servers on a daily basis, and I know that linux is a very stable operating system in most cases. The webserver applications are phenominal. Apache is the best webserver I've ever used, and with MySQL you can't find anything better... and the best thing is that it's all open-source, and there's no "per-cpu licensing" like there is with MS-SQL.

On the other hand, usually the driver support is horrible, but we (my employer, Dell) produces linux drivers for all of our hardware, so we basically rule.

I'll be getting my RHCE by December 2008 (then stacking that with my MCSE 2003: Security and CCNA on top of all my CompTIA bs [a+/net+/server+]). I know linux relatively well from the desktop side of it, and I've used RHEL 4 AS before. Linux just has a long, long way to go in the desktop world.

[zionpsyfer]

Native games: UT2k4.

Non native I run WoW and LOTRO in wine which is available for free. On a new installation I go to the Add Programs icon in the gnome menu. Search for wine, click the checkbox and click the install button. Fairly easy. I agree, a native WoW client would be preferable. But as Blizzard doesn't make a linux client...

Stable drivers - I run a dual screen setup using two SGI Geforce cards- what some would call an extreme and not common configuration. I've no issues. ATI's drivers used to suck (haven't owned an ati card lately). Their drivers sucked for windows too. I've run a multitude of Netgear ,Dlink and Belkin cards. One belkin card had issues. I couldn't get that card to work in Vista either. My experience may be the exception rather than the norm. But the number of issues I have in ubuntu is comparable to XP and less than vista.

Support - most of the major distros have great support available through their websites. Ubuntu has been my flavor of choice for a few years and I honestly have had better luck getting support from them than I have from microsoft (don't get me into MSs uPNP support). You're doing your RHCE, so I need not mention enterprise support from RH. SuSE has a wonderful enterprise support system as well I hear.

What version of office was your friend using? In Office 2007, Microsoft has again changed the format of their documents. If you're dealing with 2k3 and below, OO is used at my job on a daily basis to edit and send out excel and word files. The formatting doesn't get fubar unless one of the higher ups(they run 2k7) saves the document and sends it out. None of us (OO or 2k3 users ) can open it at that point.

If you're having to use NDISwrappers, and you're going to be mucking around under the hood, write a bash script and just have that run when you boot. You're right though, on some cards it just ends up being a big PITA. There needs to be a tool to automate NDISwrapper configuration and startup.

I still have a lot of driver hell on vista whenever I do an install for someone. This, like some of the linux issues is dependent on hardware. But I honestly do run into issues more often in Vista than in linux. XP imo is the best out of the three.

I can't agree with you more on the UAC thing.... lmao

You and your employer get HUGE kudos for the effort you're putting in. I believe Dell is making the critical first step for mass adoption to be possible. From this action, the critical mass of users needed for widespread hardware and game support could happen.

Which distros have you tried? I know Dell supports Ubuntu. The last few versions of it have really shined imo. I switched full time after having lost my XP cd. After having run various distros since 1997, I was nervous to say the least. My main box was freshly upgraded, using the two geforce cards and a very new motherboard. Feisty Fawn just ran. My Canon Rebel XT, nano, saitek joystick and dual screens all working impressed the hell out of me.

Oui, I'm starting to sound like a zealot. It definitely has its quirks, issues and pains. It's not perfect and it's not for everyone. The flash plugin for firefox still makes me throw things once in a while.

I'm rambling, so I'll finish up. You're right, it's not as easy as XP, but it's quickly getting there. I believe most of the people in this community would be able to run it with little difficulty. Try Ubuntu or SuSE if you haven't. Big thanks to your company for what they're doing.

out

[BigMac]

I definitely appreciate your kind words. I love what I do, and I love the company I work for. We're an amazing company, and I think we're headed in the right direction for me to be able to build a very strong career there.

Broadcom cards have very little linux support. I recently found out that Broadcom uses Dell servers, and they exclusively run a non-windows operating system on their servers. The funny thing about that is... they're notorious for NOT RELEASING any *nix drivers for any of their products. Who makes the drivers for the Broadcoms in their Dell PowerEdge servers? We do.

NDISWrapper can be easily configured in a few distros that I've tried. The one I've had the most success with is actually a tiny distro called ArkLinux (it's slackware based). I actually have it on my laptop (the machine I'm using right now). I've tried just about every major flavor out there. From Mandrake (yes, it was a long time ago) to Debian to Ubuntu to SuSE. The only big one I haven't tried, simply because I'm lazy, is Gentoo. My favorite would probably be Ubuntu... but I never could get ndiswrapper to work properly in it.

It was Office 2k3, and with documents that were 50+ pages long, with complex stylesheets (training manuals).

I use ATI cards exclusively, and I was very surprised that I was able to get most distros to actually boot. My desktop just does the pink/green horizontal line thing (happens with a lot of ATI cards due to poor driver prepackaging).

I'm surprised to hear what you have to say about WINE, though. The only time I used it was when I was working for a company that had an intranet that required IE6, and I was trying to install IEs4Linux. I'm glad WINE has improved enough to offer full support; I never used it when it was even capable of running simple homebrewed programs.

One thing I do really enjoy about *nix is how much more efficient the TCP/IP stack is. I've literally done bandwidth speed tests in Windows XP/Vista and tested around 3000kbps, then booted into Linux and increased that to 5000kbps (and subsequently switched back and forth between the operating systems to make sure it wasn't a fluke).