System Problem
Yesterday night the sound card for my Tecra M7 mysteriously stopped working. I am not sure what happened. My initial guess is that it was a software/driver problem, since I could still change the volume with the button/slider on the front, yet the usual display of the volume going up/down did not display in the center of the screen.
I tried several things, including flashing the BIOS (it wouldn’t do this since it’s up to date), and re-installing the drivers (which failed, since they are installed and for some reason the processes that needed to be re-installed were being used or something, and therefore the files couldn’t be overwritten). I was just about at my wit’s end, and contemplating re-installing the OS since I *really* need the sound to work for recording classes w/ the built in mic.
Then I thought, “Why not use System Restore?”. And lo, there was a restore point from yesterday. And I chose it, and it worked. Mind you, it did not work off the bat after the restore – but the volume display slider would come up when I changed the volume. So whatever had gone wrong with the drivers was solved. But the sound didn’t work still. However, I started playing an audio file nonetheless, then muted and unmuted the sound, and it worked! The sound was back! Music to my ears!
I did a few quick searches on this mysterious sound disappearance issue while I was trying to fix it, and found a brief paragraph somewhere that mentioned the internal amp is actually turned off by the mute/unmute switch when you mute it in XP, and that in Vista it actually just goes to zero volume instead. I think what happened with the M7 is that the internal amp was muted at some point by me, and then the drivers screwed up for some reason… which isn’t surprising since I’m experimenting with software and drivers all the time.
Resolution
So, lesson learned: If your sound disappears for an unknown reason and the drivers appear to malfunction, do a system restore and mute-unmute the computer.
Did you ever discover that the audio recording only records for 60 seconds at a time? I was very unhappy to find this out. Who wants to continually have to push the record button every 60 seconds? Plus, the prompt doesn’t even open up all the way for me to see the brads with “record” and so forth. They are barely visible in the box.
Zoressa: are you referring to the windows Sound Recorder? If so, then there is a simple way to extend the amount of time it will record. After starting a recording, just drag the time marker as it is moving, and this will extend the total length it will record before stopping automatically. You should see “Length” increase as you drag the bar.