For the past several months I’ve been having fits with my PC. It’s a rather new Dell unit, works just fine, with the sole exception of the sounds: system sounds would play just fine but anything complex like music was distorted in some way or another. Sometimes it was generally garbled, sometimes all I could hear was bass and no lyrics, oft had a strange echo effect.

Reinstalling drivers had no effect. Once I changed a hardware setting for some video player inside the browser to NOT use hardware acceleration and that seemed to clear it up… for a few weeks anyway.

Sunday I was rebuilding my ipod so hearing what I was doing was a bit important, so I was tracking this down some more. Nothing was working, but then I started guessing the speakers were in the wrong output. Actually seeing the tower is an issue as it is stuffed aside my desk and not very assessable, but headphones into the speakers sounded like trash but into the PC front panel was perfect!

Dang I must have the speakers plugged into the wrong output I thought. Since they are on an extension patch cord (which is on my desk behind the monitor) I went to move it into the front jack, but as I touched the connectors… BING, perfect sound.

Yeah, it was just a loosie connection all the time. Remove and insert a few times and tucked it back, and enjoyed my music the rest of the night.

 

Who says there ain't no easy answers! Nice when it works out that way..

 

"Nice"???

Did you catch the part when I said I had this problem for several months and all it was was a partially inserted plug?

Having some sounds sound perfect was enough of a false flag to have me looking at apps and settings and codecs.

I felt rather stoopid when I wiggled the plug and it worked.

 

Yeah, I did. But I find that as I get older, I feel stoopid about more and more things. When the damage is limited to me feeling stoopid about a cable as opposed to feeling the same way AND having to go through apps, settings and codecs, I'll take the former. As long as I can say 'Honey, its fixed!', I consider it a good day.

 

Our internet was out this morning so my wife got me up at 5:30 AM to let me know about it.

I told her to turn the main AP unit off count to 20 and turn it back on. More than likely we had a power blink last night and it just locked up.

Well that didn't do it so I told her to do the same to the main router unit in the one closet. Nope still out.
So I get up and I do the same thing to both and wow they fire right up and work just fine.

Turned out the whole problem is wife's count to 20 takes about the same time my count to 4 does. Next time I am going to tell her to turn both off for a full one minute by the clock and not by her estimates how long a minute is.