That’s a fairly common problem, and the reason for it is that your computer has a specialised sound codec that requires a specialised driver that’s not included with your copy of Windows. Windows might either have installed the best driver that it could find, which, it turns out, isn’t up to the job, or it can’t find a suitable driver, realises it, and therefore gives up trying to install any driver.

What is a driver?

A driver is a piece of software, specific to a relevant piece of hardware, that translates the instruction data from the machine in which it is situated into a command sequence that is recognisable by that piece of hardware. Without that driver the piece of hardware might as well not exist as far as the operating system is concerned, as it has no other way of recognising it or communicating with it except through the driver.

Imagine you came face to face with an alien: You have no idea what anything the alien says means, and the alien can’t understand your language either: Therefore, unless you can find an interpreter that speaks both your own language as well as the alien’s language, there is no way of you and the alien communicating properly. Now imagine that you are the computer, the alien is the piece of hardware, and the driver is the interpreter… You now get the idea.

Each is special

All drivers are hardware-specific, but Windows, particularly in the case of Windows XP, includes driver models that in many cases will just translate enough to allow your hardware to function in a limited capacity until you can download and install the proper driver. There are two other cases that could be possible too: Either Windows has the exact driver for the hardware, in which case it’ll install it and the piece of hardware in question will run properly from the outset, or the case may be that either Windows will attempt to install a driver that fails to install properly because it’s not the right one, or Windows will see that it doesn’t have the correct driver and won’t try to install anything at all in relation to that piece of hardware – With the result that when the operating system is fully installed and begins functioning, it won’t even see that the related hardware exists at all.

If Windows attempts to install a driver that it thinks might work but finds that it doesn’t it’ll, in the case of XP anyway, abandon attempts to try further and leave a bad driver in place at times:This will result in a similar outcome to not having any driver installed usually, plus a black exclamation-mark on a yellow background will appear in the Device Manager in relation to that piece of hardware, indicating that the operating system sees that a device is present, but the installed driver is the wrong one and thus there is a fault somewhere. The device may show up as something like “PCI Multimedia Device”, indicating that Windows knows what type of device it is, but no more. In short; without the drivers Windows has no way to control the hardware so it treats it as if it’s not there.

In such cases the right thing to do would be to totally uninstall the device in Device Manager, and install the correct driver(s).

How do I find the correct driver(s)?

Drivers come from one of two places; those being either your Windows installation or your hardware manufacturer.

The good news is that it’s usually not too hard to find drivers; particularly for recent versions of Windows from XP onwards.

Manufacturer-specific hardware drivers can be obtained from places such as the HP support site, if your machine was manufactured by HP.

Other major computer vendors like Dell and others also take advantage of the internet to have support sites that provide the latest software drivers and updates for the machines that they sell. And most also have fairly active support forums these days where you can get specific help for your computer and hardware from other users as well as, occasionally, the vendor’s staff too.

In some cases you might need to actually determine what specific piece of “driverless” hardware is in the computer, and then visit that hardware manufacturer’s site to download the latest updated drivers. That’s very common for custom built machines, or machines from smaller vendors: ‘Not as common in mass-manufactured machines, such as Dell computers, for instance.

Once you’ve found the correct driver(s) for your piece of hardware, you’ll probably find instructions for installation from the manufacturer either on their website or in a readme file within the installation-package itself. – Usually it’s a pretty straightforward case of simply running the .exe file and an installation wizard takes care of the rest of the process with minimal user interaction.

In your particular case you may find that you have a particular specification of Realtek driver required to operate the onboard sound hardware on your motherboard, perhaps, or something similar.

7

Windows 7, at time of launch, appears to have either a proper a driver or a substitute-driver that’ll make the hardware operate at reduced-level for almost every piece of hardware imaginable at the time. – Another thing about Windows 7 is that it’ll search Windows Update for drivers that aren’t included on the DVD during installation, so it’ll possibly7 be quite rare to discover that a driver is missing after installation in the case of that operating system. Having said that, though, there will no doubt be new drivers produced for new hardware over time that neither Windows 7 nor Windows Update will have in their respective driver-arsenals.

At the end of the day; the best place to go for drivers is to the manufacturer’s website; particularly in the case of graphics card drivers. See this article for more on that.

Have you anything that you’d like to add to that? If so then please do comment.

In the same way that you should always make backups of your computer’s operating system as is, plus your files; so, in the same way you should back up your WordPress blog.

Backing-up your blog doesn’t mean just keeping a copy of the files that are immediately available via your blog’s FTP server though; those aren’t the only files that you should back-up. Although those files are important, there are other files that are equally if not more important: Those files are the files in your database.

Think of your database as a simile of the Windows Registry: All the files that appear on your blog’s FTP server have corresponding entries in the database, in any one or possibly more of a number of specific tables in the database.

I won’t get too technical here; but I’ll just say that without the correct database a WordPress blog on a Linux server doesn’t work. – So you need to back-up your database as well as your files. How do you do that?

Well there are several ways of doing that; but here’s the one, possibly most unorthodox, way of doing it that I find the easiest by far.

Before I go into backing up your database I thought that I’d have a word about database optimization. – You see everything that is ever a file on your blog itself gets an entry in the database, but if you remove a file from your blog the database entry corresponding to it remains in place. For instance, say that you start writing a post on WordPress itself, and after you’ve written a page you decide that what you’ve written isn’t a good enough standard of writing for publication. You therefore decide that you’re just not in the right frame of mind to do it right now, that you’ll delete the page you saved, and come back to it and start again later on. You delete the page, but its database entry remains. When you start again there’s another database entry, which you save half-way through writing it when you have a coffee-break; and that’s another database-entry. (No;  the saved page, silly, not the coffee-break.   )

So as time goes by, as you can imagine, the database gets cluttered with junk, in the form of entries for saved, revised pages, etc. One page may be saved and revised many times, each creates a database entry, though the only copy you actually want is the latest revision, in most cases. – Therefore you could find that the amount of space that your database takes up on your server’s hard-drive could almost equal the amount of space taken up by the other files eventually, even though most of it is occupied by unwanted junk-entries.

Optimise first

This is where database-optimisation comes into its own. Optimizing your database means clearing out all the unwanted crap that’s making it huge, and only keeping the entries that are needed. In the old days you had to learn MySQL, install and operate phpMyAdmin, etc, to do that. These days the geeks associated with WordPress have built a plugin so that you don’t have to.

The free plugin is called WP-Optimize, not surprisingly, and it does what it says on the tin: It automatically optimises (Yes I spelled it the English way that time.) your WP database. It’s exactly like any other plugin to set up, it goes into the plugins directory inside the WP-content folder, and you activate it via the plugins section of the WordPress user interface. You’ll find the settings configurations for it in the ‘Dashboard’ section.

This plugin will optimise your database so that it doesn’t become too huge; fat with unwanted junk, causing wasted time when you back it up.

- Which brings us back up to the subject of back-up: I’ll now tell you how to back-up your database pretty much totally automatically, with very little interaction, so that there’ll be a copy of the backup of your database files retained on your server, and also you’ll have one handy on your computer too, along with the files you back-up via FTP, should the worst come to the worst.

In a while I’ll tell you what I do to accomplish this: You might like to copy me, or you might like to adapt my method to suit yourself. Whatever is the case, you’ll first have to install another plugin: -

Database back-up

This time the free plugin’s called WP-DB-backup, and it once again avoids you having to learn MySQL and phpMyAdmin by automating the backup of your database.

Install and activate it in the usual way, and set it to back-up all your database tables to your server on a daily schedule. It’ll create a folder in WP-content called ‘Backup-oc879′, if I remember correctly. Inside that folder it’ll deposit a zipped backup of your database as an .sql.gz file on a daily basis as per your settings. You’ll find the settings for this plugin in the ‘Tools’ section of WP.

I’ll mention, at this point, that when your blog starts to get big like mine is, with over 500 posts, the backups are also rather large. – You only need the latest backup (+ the one before that, for ‘luck’.) – So every week I go into that folder and erase all but the last 2 backups, which are around 12MBs in size each in my case, because I find that they take a long time to download, and if there’s less of them, considering I really only want 2 of them, then getting rid of the trash makes a lighter load.

FTP it

OK – So your database now is backed up daily to your server, and you back-up all the files on your server on a daily-basis, manually, via FTP. – That way you’ve backed up everything, including your automatically-backed-up database too. (Unfortunately you will have to install and learn phpMyAdmin if you ever need to restore your database files; but at least you’ll have a backup or more to hand should the need arise.)

I have 9 backups at a time for reference purposes on my computer.

"NINE!?"

Yes, nine: ‘kkomp latest backup #1′, ‘kkomp latest backup #2′, ‘kkomp latest backup #3′… all inside a single folder. Whenever I need to make a new backup, I find the oldest backup and delete everything inside the folder, then I back-up the entire blog including database backup(s) to the empty folder via FTP. – That way, if I do something, try it out, and then decide that it was better the way it was x-days ago, I have a back-up of just that.

Yes, it’s a little extra work, (- And you have no idea how extremely slowly and laboriously each of those backups transfers across a LAN at an average speed of somewhere around 167KB/s. It also takes over an hour to FTP them up from the server too; but I just do something else while that’s going on.) but it’s all part of the job to me. I even copy a backup to another file after renaming it by adding the word ‘old’ to its title once in a while, just for posterity’s sake.

Anyway; that’s how it’s done in my case.

Enjoy the rest of the week.

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According to figures released by Net Applications on or around 5th November 2009, it would seem that Windows 7 had at that time already taken 3.67% of the operating system market; a 1.68% growth since its launch on 22nd October 2009.Most if not all of the figures released on 22nd October were related to the free release Candidate, but the increasing figures suggest that many users are upgrading their operating systems to Windows 7.

Despite this somewhat explosive growth; it appears also that Windows 7 installations, in the main, are simply replacing older Windows operating systems, rather than capturing market real-estate from competitors. From September to end of October 2009 the Mac’s market-share grew from 5.12% of the market to 5.27%; a rise of 0.15%. Did those users migrate over from Linux or Windows; or are they perhaps using Windows and Mac on separate computers? Maybe they’re new users? It appears that Windows 7 isn’t causing any Mac people to convert at this time.

The overall Windows market share in fact dropped slightly in October. Nevertheless, Windows accounts for 92.52% of the marketing total, according to available figures released on 5th November, compared to 92.77% in September. – It’s growth, then, for both Microsoft and Apple.

That fact could well be due to the timing of Apple’s release of Snow Leopard, as well as the factor of a good pricing policy on their part. The low price of Snow Leopard in comparison to Windows 7 is offset by the high price that Mac users initially paid for their machines; so all in all the cost of running either comes down to a similar figure at the end of the day.

Of course, the figures released by Net Applications quite obviously are more relevant to the USA than globally it would appear, although do correct me if I am wrong. The sales of Macs in America appear to be greater then their global sales figures; so the figures presented herein could paint more of a cloudy picture for Windows 7 than is actually the case.

Whatever the case; it appears that Microsoft have scored  rather well so far with their new operating system. It would be interesting to compare the difference in percentage terms between those Win 7 users who are installing the 64-bit version and those installing the 32-bit version. – I don’t have those figures available currently, but any significant increases in 64-bit usage is sure to increase speed of the heralding-in of the age of 64-bit computing.

Why is this so important? Because although a 64-bit operating system utilises more memory-space for its operation, with an increase in 64-bit computing comes an increase of both operating system and hardware-versatility: Gone is the up-to 4-megabyte memory limitation with 64-bit, and it’ll be a good few years before a motherboard is manufactured that can hold even a single exabyte of RAM. Also advantageous is the fact that 64-bit hardware is far more multi-application-flexible; therefore executing a number of different programs simultaneously puts less strain on the hardware and allows faster operation.

I’ve heard it said amongst certain geeks that standardisation of 64-bit software with regard to a Windows environment will be at least two years in coming: Personally I doubt that, and would estimate that figure to be one year at most. Without the 64-bit-adoption-statistics to hand, however, I can currently only speculate.

What’s your view?

‘Unfamiliar with Windows 7?

‘Wondering whether to upgrade and ‘don’t know what to expect?

‘Don’t know how much better Windows 7 is than Vista?

- Then you need Microsoft’s Windows 7 Product Guide!

Why am I promoting it? There’s nothing financially in it for me. – But there’s a lot in it for you, so read it and find out about Windows 7; whether you purchase it or not.

From the Overview section of the download page: -

“The Windows 7 Product Guide provides a detailed look at the many new and improved features in Windows 7. The guide is designed as an accurate source of information that can help you to understand how Windows 7 Simplifies Everyday Tasks, Works the Way You Want, and Makes New Things Possible. The guide is also designed to provide IT Professionals with information about how to Make People Productive Anywhere, Manage Risk Through Enhanced Security and Control, and Reduce Costs by Streamlining PC Management. This is not a help and how to guide. Rather, it provides an overview of the many exciting features in Windows 7 and pointers to more information. The Windows 7 Product Guide is available in both XPS and PDF formats.”

You can use either the XPS reader included in Windows Vista and Windows 7 to read the documents in their .xps version, or if you prefer you can download the .pdf version and read the documents in Windows XP, Vista, or 7. – The choice is yours.

It’s available in 2 formats and it’s free; so grab your copy today. – And while you’re at it, why not join my mailing list too?

- Windows 7, and my mailing-list: The future of computing, if I may be so bold.

Windows Help

- Oh yes; one more thing:

If you’re wondering where the Windows Help program is in Windows 7; particularly if you never bothered with Vista; but upgraded to Windows 7 from XP, read on: -

Microsoft didn’t include the Help program on the Windows 7 disk, just like they also didn’t include it on the Windows Vista DVD. – But you can download it online.

According to Microsoft, on the download page: _

“Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) is a Help program that has been included with Microsoft Windows versions starting with the Microsoft Windows 3.1 operating system. However, the Windows Help program has not had a major update for many releases and no longer meets Microsoft’s standards. Therefore, starting with the release of Windows Vista and continuing in Windows 7, the Windows Help program will not ship as a feature of Windows. If you want to view 32-bit .hlp files, you must download and install the program (WinHlp32.exe) from the Microsoft Download Center.”

- So the Windows Help program for Windows 7 is a supplemental program, referenced in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as KB917607. It’s downloadable for free online.

What happens now?

When you attempt to download the Windows Help.exe files for Windows 7, you’ll first have to validate your copy of Windows 7. If this is your first time of validating your copy of Windows 7, you might have to download the Windows Genuine Advantage tool before you can proceed. When you’ve done that, and it’s settled down, scroll to the bottom of the window and click on “continue”.

You’ll be informed whether your Windows installation is genuine or not, and if it is you’ll be able to download either the 32-bit or the 64-bit version of the additional software.

(Download the x86 file if you’re running the 32-bit version of Windows 7, or the x64 file if you’re running the 64-bit version of Windows 7.)

Select the ‘Install using Windows Installer…’ option and let it do the deed: Your help files are now installed. – Target neutralised.