My future stepson successfully installed my Xbox 360 PC Wireless Gaming Receiver on his laptop yesterday (XP SP3), and immediately lost sound. Unplugging the receiver enables sound again. He intends to play classic Nintendo ROMs.
I googled this a bit today at work, but came up empty. Since I’m not near the machine and won’t be again until tomorrow afternoon, I think I’ve hit a wall because I don’t know the specs (including audio hardware). But I do know that there is no external sound card.
One thought would be to go to control panel, then Sounds and Audio devices. From there, check the audio tab with the receiver unplugged and see how things are setup. Check it again after plugging it in. If changes occurred, set them back manually to the working configuration.
I had the same issue with my wireless receiver. Once I plugged it in the sound quality dropped to radio quality and it would echo endlessly. After digging trough 200+ Google pages I found a solution which was to plug the receiver into an USB-Hub(without it’s own power supply) and plug the USB hub into the computer.
At least in W7 (and Vista) you are able to select the primary sound source. Not sure how XP handles it, but there might be a preference somewhere. That or just go to device properties and disable the USB soundcard (if its listed).
Well, as it turns out the kid fixed it himself by fiddling around and uninstalling/reinstalling something. Took a couple of hours, according to his mom. Haven’t spoken to him directly about it yet, so I’m still curious to know what went down there.
I should have had more faith in him. Early on in our relationship starting this year, I noticed that he was very attracted to the idea of fixing hardware/software issues but seemed to lack patience for the troubleshooting part, e.g. try this, fail, try that, fail, try something else, win. The kind of frustration he was exhibiting had me concerned about his chances of “getting” the process. However, this week’s problem resolution and one or two others leave me feeling pretty encouraged and optimistic now.
I’ve installed that receiver several times on XP and 7 and I did once have this problem. As suggested up thread, Windows had decided that all sound should be fed through the headset sound device, rather than my onboard sound card.
