Windows Tools, Help & Guides

In this guest post, James Ricketts discusses how to handle PC sound card problems. Find out more about James at the end of this post.

You just double-clicked your favorite song, turned the volume up, but guess what – there is no audio! You wait wondering what the cause could be, but still no luck. Your speaker simply refuses to produce any sound.

You frantically scan your sound file for a virus and the scan results show everything is clear. Your computer is new, so the cause cannot be a faulty sound card, or incorrect entries in the windows registry.

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Its quite hard to believe Microsoft Security Essentials has been with us 14 months.  In that time it has continued to impress everyone that seems to use it and keeps critics happy with its great detection rates and small footprint on the system.

Microsoft have now released MSE version 2.0.657.0, meaning a much better free application to keep our PCs safe and secure.

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You try to initiate the dialer in Windows 7 and only found that it doesn’t work and returned with an Error 651: Your modem (or other connecting device) has reported an error. You had tried to restart your PC, your router, your modem etc. and the problem doesn’t go away.

The Possible Solutions

It is not hard to find that there are a number of users encounter this issue on the internet, but surprisingly this error bugs some of the Windows 7 (Beta or even RTM) users and it seems that there is actually no official solution for it.

There are, however, a lot of workarounds, suggested, of course, by other users. If you have this problem in Windows 7 (or may be Windows Vista/XP as some of the solutions works on these operating systems, too), check out what I have found for the possible solutions for this error:

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Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification issued: December 9, 2010
Microsoft Security Bulletins to be issued: December 14, 2010

This is an advance notification of security bulletins that Microsoft is intending to release on December 14, 2010.

This bulletin advance notification will be replaced with the December bulletin summary on December 14, 2010. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

To receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft Security Bulletins are issued, subscribe to Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft will host a webcast to address customer questions on the security bulletins on December 15, 2010, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the December Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

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The System Health Report is a great feature of Windows 7 that will help you find potential problems with your PC and point you in the right direction to a resolution. This report records details about your computer’s performance, resource usage, and more and includes diagnostic information about things that aren’t working with resolution suggestions.

Specifically, the report includes:

• Diagnostic Results (Warnings, Performance)
• Software Configuration (OS Checks, Security Center Information, System Services, Startup Programs)
• Hardware Configuration (Disk Checks, Systems, Desktop Rating, BIOS, Devices)
• CPU (Process, Service, Services, System)
• Network (TCP, Interface, IP, UDP)
• Disk (Hot files, Disk breakdown, Physical disk, NTFS Performance)
• Memory (Processes, Counters)

In this guide, we’ll cover the following:

1. How to run a system health check.
2. View the output of a system health check.
3. Research Issues.
4. Fix Issues.
5. Get help with reported issues.

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Hardware manufacturers frequently update device drivers for their hardware to improve compatibility, efficiency, performance, and security.

A device driver simplifies programming by acting as a translator between a hardware device and the applications or operating systems that use it. Programmers can write the higher-level application code independently of whatever specific hardware device it will ultimately control, because code and device can interface in a standard way, regardless of the software superstructure or of underlying hardware.

Source

This guide will show you how to update your drivers using three different methods:

1. Update drivers using Windows’ Device Manager
2. Update drivers with Device Doctor
3. Update drivers manually by downloading them from the manufacturer’s website

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