Speakers...

[ArtOfWarfare]

I noticed Windows was being unusually quiet...

so I just tried to change the volume...

there's a circle with a slash through it which makes me think there's an issue with the speakers...

how do I fix it?

Oh... and none of the stuff made by the game company Valve seems to work anymore... Hammer crashed... Half-Life 2 won't load... Portal won't load... sometimes I get an error message... other times it simply doesn't work.

The error message says

hl2.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

How do I fix it? And are my two problems related?

 

[kolax]

Do the speakers work on OS X properly?

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Do the speakers work on OS X properly?

Yeah

I'm wondering if maybe when I went and tried to get windows to stop reporting errors and making all kinds of noises I maybe touched something I shouldn't have...

I think I'll go turn PnP back on...

Edit: Okay, lol.

Well, to anyone else as naive as me... DON'T TURN OFF PLUG AND PLAY!

I finally got an intelligible error message one time when I started up Half-Life 2... rather than the generic windows crash error I got several times in a row... HL2 told me: "Speaker Drivers are not working and initialization has been canceled." or something like that. So I went back into the CP, admin, services, and turned PnP back to automatic.

...

I guess I can just tell windows to shut up every time when it gives me the "new hardware" message... it always wants to set up my eyeTV for me but I've already tried once and found that the software that came in the box works with Mac OS X only and to get the Windows download I have to pay extra... and I'm perfectly content with only using it on the Mac side so I don't want to set it up.

...

does anyone know of a way of me telling Windows that I just want it to ignore the eyeTV so it'll never ask me to try and set it up again?