So my sound driver decided to fail on me all of a sudden, and I have to re-add my sound drivers and such, which is leading me to ask this question... is this really a decent sound driver? On my desktop I use Soundmax, which works fine, but my laptop came with Realtek (And somewhere in my start menu there's some dolby program which doesn't work without a sound driver). Any input on if I should change sound drivers? Or is this sound driver fine? My laptop's max sound is rather quiet, but I'm wondering if that has something to do with the driver, as opposed to my initial thought of it being the laptop... Help?
The driver is what allows the Operating System to recognize the hardware and use it. If you have a Realtek audio chipset then you're going to have to use their driver. If you have an Nvidia based video card you can't use ATI drivers because you like they way they look (or whatever). That said, most notebook manufacturers have specific drivers that may be tweaked for use in their specific systems. I would suggest going to your notebook manufacturer's website and updating the audio driver to the latest version for your operating system. You mention that the sound is too low--make sure you check the software volume as well as the hardware volume. Most notebooks have buttons to mute, increase, or decrease the volume but you also have to remember there's a software volume control too.
Ahh, thanks, I thought that you could mix sound drivers for some reason, silly me. I found out why it was so quiet, and that was because of some dolby program, which muffled the sound a lot. I had checked the realtek panel several times before getting fed up and living with it lol. (I found the program when I was locating the sound drivers and found out that it stopped working, and then once I reinstalled the realtek it still wasn't working but the volume was louder