Talk:Updating Sound Device Drivers

Gale 01Feb10: James, do you like the "route panel" at the top of some of these tips pages? It was left unfinished, and done rather confusingly, and I don't like the garish background colour and the conflict with the "Introrel" template links. We do have a routing in the Manual FAQ but those links are section links. I suggest sometime I remove this and just make sure all pages have Introrel templates so you can get back to Category:Tips and to the relevant Tips section. James 01Feb10: Fine to remove them, fine to keep them (but yes the colour would need to be in the safe blues/purples/greys palette that prevents colour clashes). Can I suggest a new template for tips and a new template for tutorials, both of which are clones of introrel? Then we can change that template if we wish to make a systematic change to tutorials or tips pages. A second idea, not sure how useful it is - a around every thing after the introrel on tutorials and tips pages. Then we can easily make a page that shows all these page headers.


 * Dogshed 26Apr11: My Vista has Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound.
 * Gale 26Apr11: Thanks, I have checked a number of images on the internet that show the full height of the Vista control panel, and this seems to be true. I've corrected the article.


 * Steve: Regarding "Extra help for Windows users: All Windows users are strongly recommended to try updating their drivers via Device Manager in the first instance, before looking for drivers on the internet". This seems to contradict the previous paragraph. When using the Device Manager, Windows will look for more recent generic Windows drivers and will rarely if ever find the most recent manufacturers drivers. Thus it is common that the Device Manager will report that no new drivers are available, even if the current drivers are ancient. The first paragraph is the correct approach - the manufacturers' web site should be checked for updated drivers.
 * Gale: There isn't any contradiction. The previous paragraph says "Windows users are strongly recommended to try this update facility as a first step - see Extra help for Windows users below." It does make for a slightly confused first section possibly, but I think the "Extra help for Windows users" is correct, on the grounds that inexperienced Windows users will struggle with using CPU-Z or digging through the Windows system information to get the device ID. I agree many times Device Manager will find nothing but MS drivers, but sometimes later MS drivers are enough to fix the problem, and Device Manager does sometimes find manufacturer's drivers, especially on laptops and note/netbooks. If Device Manager cures the problem, it's heaps safer and easier than looking on the web, being tempted by some quick fix driver download site and downloading inappropriate or infected drivers, which our support workers then have to cope with. I have spent hours trying to fix problems with users incompetently installing arbitrary drivers from web sites, as I am sure you have. So though in principle I agree with you, in practice I'm not so sure. Maybe this page could still be tweaked, as it has not been looked at in a long time, so feel free to comment further.