Restoring microphone and sound after Windows 10 upgrade

Warning: this one will get ranty.

At home I run Windows 10 - an operating system I carefully selected and in no way appeared on my computer while I was reading a book. It actually works pretty well for my gaming needs (the only reason it's not Linux) but does have a habit of trying to sell me things or steal all my information.

It also has a habit of dropping massive named updates which do exciting new things like BREAK EVERYTHING.

Recently a huge update landed which I'm going to call the GDPR update. Mostly because I can't be bothered to look up its actual name. When I originally "opted" to install Windows 10 I went through and disabled the inbuilt advertising and random tips on the lock screen because I'm a bit old fashioned and inane nonsense written on screen when I'm logging in just doesn't do it for me. GDPR should only help my desire to avoid advertising - only a truly scummy company would use being forced to confirm my privacy choices as an excuse to turn everything back on and hope I don't notice.

I noticed. You lose.

Special mention for the "send information for diagnosis" option which now lets me choose between "yes, everything and don't forget my passwords" and "only some things". Apparently the older option of "don't send anything" is no longer viable in today's excitingly connected world.

So anyway, I have to choose to not have voice control turned on. No really, really really, please die Cortana. Then maybe my mic wont be on permanently listening to me. It appears it is indeed off. PERMANENTLY. Along with ALL MY SOUND.

Grr, rage, etc. This is revenge for disabling advertising, isn't it?

Anyway, the sound has died before and was a pain to fix both times, so I thought I'd document what I did for the next time this happens. The symptom: output seems silent. On closer inspection there does appear to be sound coming out of the card, however even with the output boosted high it's very tinny and quiet. Many people find problems in their Sound menus (volume being dropped to nothing, device being disabled) but I had a different issue.

My card is a Soundblaster SomethingOrOther, which has a separate config screen called the Creative Audio Control Panel (which I had to reinstall to get working, incidentally). On this panel there is a Headphone Detection tab, which has options to make the device change behaviour when headphones are connected. This seems to get locked on for me, causing the muting effect.

Voila.


I disable the options and it all works perfectly again. I've done this before, however the Windows 10 upgrades sometimes reset these options. Thanks for that. I've experienced this same problem with a Realtek card and the fix was the same - Realtek has a similar control panel.

Now for the microphone which is a new and exciting problem. It seems that because I've asked Windows not to let Cortana listen to me all the time, it has interpreted that as "for the sake of my privacy DO NOT ALLOW ANY APPLICATION TO USE MY MICROPHONE". Which is ... extreme.

Anyway, this new option has gone a bit mad and disabled access from everything and sanity needs restoring. The new button is hidden in the Privacy menu, selecting Microphone from the left menu.

Voila. Again.


So things are back to normal. I wonder what will break next? And I wonder if my next ranty post about operating systems will be about how annoying Windows is, or how much I hate OSX? If anyone is placing a bet, I've just had to reinstall Homebrew...

And lo, I have Windows 10

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my gaming PC to Windows 10 for some time but it didn’t manage to be the most important thing on my todo list at any point. Partly this was fear of the unknown - I knew Win10 was going to be a shift in UX and also thought it likely to break at least one peripheral. My attitude to an operating system is that it should do its job quietly and not get in the way and, frankly, I didn’t feel inclined to invest time in adoption pains. That’s time I can spend more profitably sleeping or looking out of the window.

Microsoft, it seems, had other ideas. They pushed the Win10 upgrade through their patch management system and I fell victim to the auto-upgrade problem. It’s a dark, stormy night. The wind is shaking the windows, drowning out the drumming of the rain. I’m sitting in a partly lit room, curled up comfortably and reading something on my tablet. In the corner, my computer is on, untouched for the past hour. I glance up and a chill runs through me. On my monitor is the ominous message “75% upgraded”.

I could write extensively about the aggressive way Microsoft have pushed Win10. I could complain at length about it arriving on my computer unwanted and the abuse of trust around using a security patch mechanism to automatically install a complete operating system without my input. I could compare the techniques used in release of this system to the way malware is spread. But others have done all that. Instead, I’ll focus on my experiences now it has arrived.

It’s fine.

Sorry, that was really dull but honestly it sums it up. The installation process was really simple. I had to track down and turn off the P2P patch sharing stuff (uncharitable, but I wasn’t in the best mood at this point) and some of the information sharing stuff (Win10 is horribly intrusive) but otherwise it just loaded up as New Windows with no real fuss.

The next evening I sat down to see what had really happened behind the scenes. First step was going through the security and privacy options. The defaults here were horrible (everything seems to have access to everything, including cameras and microphones) but the menus themselves were clear and it was easy to turn it all off. I also came across some advertising options - it seems in the brave new world of Windows it’s a good idea to have (targeted) advertising on your lock screen. Fortunately, both the targeting and the advertising can be disabled (separately) and so that went too. The start menu was a mess, but simple enough to remove the new and exciting rubbish and simplify back to the applications I’m actually going to use.

Next up, there is Cortana. I like the idea of Cortana and I quite fancied playing around with her. Unfortunately, in order to be helpful she looks at everything you do and sends it all off to Microsoft HQ so they can tune her electronic brain. So she had to die. Killing her off was actually harder than it needed to be - stopping her talking to Microsoft wasn’t too hard, but that left her zombified husk on my task bar and I had to work out how to purge her from there too.

Having finished with my electronic holy water, I moved on to my own customisations. I found that Steam, Chrome and Office all worked fine which is the majority of my use of that computer immediately. Also, my automatic backups (I use Macrium) continued to work and mapped drives were still mapped.

So far, so painless. I hadn’t needed to reconfigure anything and the new interface hadn’t caused me any real suffering. Time to check the two things I feared would break - the main reasons for putting off the upgrade in the first place. My joystick and my game recording setup.

First off, the joystick. My basic fear was that the (already shoddy) performance of the drivers would be even worse under a more modern operating system. My fears were confirmed when it failed to load properly. To Google! Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person looking for help (this thread was very useful) and - much to my surprise - Mad Catz had released some beta drivers for Windows 10. The Win7 drivers were released in 2011, whereas the Win10 drivers came from August 2015. And they worked. Probably better than the older drivers (I didn’t, for example, suffer any blue screens while installing them). I’d lost some of my settings, but that was easy to replicate and it was fine.

I did notice a problem on boot. Win10 boots faster than the USB devices which caused problems with my stick. This was easily fixed by disabling Fast Boot. It didn’t seem like the best solution, but it worked.

Next up, game recording. Astonishingly, this also Just Worked. Mostly. I had to re-enable some of the output devices in the sound menus, but I got everything going just by double-checking the everything in my original post.

Windows 10 is fast, stable, not overly ugly, and very easy to install. It’s a change to the user interface, but not one that particularly gets in the way of just using the computer. It’s a pig for privacy, but you can turn all that nonsense off. So, overall a surprisingly good experience. 9/10. Would have my computer hijacked and a new OS forcibly installed again.

How to play Star Wars - Harmy's Despecialised Edition

Are you one of those fans who think the Star Wars original trilogy has gotten worse with each successive release? Do you get angry watching Han Solo step on Jabba's tail and not get his face shot off? Do you go on about Han shooting first? Or wonder where the mountain went in the twin sun sunset?

In short, are you a human being?

Help is at hand, from a chap named Harmy. This colossus of a man has created a "despecialized" edition - basically an upscaling with all the new additions taken out. You can find the iso files here.

Actually playing them is a bit of a trick. The first (platform non-specific) tip is:

Make sure your files are not corrupted.

Seriously. That cost me a couple of evenings.

Windows 7

* mount the iso as a drive using daemon tools
* download vlc - I have this running with version 2.1
* in vlc do media -> open file -> select your virtual drive -> bdmv -> stream -> m2ts file

Et voila!

Linux

* mount the drive thus:

sudo mount -o loop -t udf $path_to_iso/ANH.ISO $mountpoint

* download vlc or pull it from a repository (package name vlc in ubuntu)
* in vlc do media -> open file -> mountpoint -> bdmv -> stream -> m2ts file

Suddenly you're back in the past, watching Star Wars version awesome.