Monday, February 19, 2007

Still Tweaking Vista on the Portege M200

Last week, I discovered that the sound on my Toshiba Portege M200 on which I have loaded Vista would not play sound. Some might say that is a good thing since the speakers on this laptop just suck big time. A friend of mine threatened to kick my ass once because I kept playing things over the speakers while he could hear it. Something about chalkboards.... Anyway, it wouldn't play sounds via the headphone jack either. So, I started trying to fix it including interacting with Joshua Flanagan on his blog. This is the blog that was the source of my inspiration to load Vista on the M200 in the first place. But, alas his machine and mine seemed to be the same except his mades sounds and mine didn't.

Then, I discovered an entry on Jeffreys Ruminations - Network Blog where Jeffrey said:
Key Tip: If you upgrade to Vista and have no sound, you need to temporarily go back to XP or a Linux distribution and unmute your system volume. Better yet, un-mute your audio BEFORE upgrading to Windows Vista.
Read more...

Too bad I didn't discover this tip first. But, then I found this on Toshiba's support site. I decided to get brave and run it on the M200 despite the failure of Toshiba to indicate that I should expect it to work. Well, it did!

I 2 applications that don't work well now. RealPlayer won't play the free radio stations. So, I uninstalled it. And, ZipBackup doesn't let me expand and select individual folders on my C Drive and it is able to see the other built in collections like Music. I haven't decided what I am going to do about it yet.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try using Real Alternative. It works muh better than the actual Realplayer...

Hilton Travis said...

HI Jeffrey,

Same goes with Quicktime Alternative. Much less resource hungry than the originals.