ItsGeekToMe.co

Happy 9^th Anniversary, It’s Geek To Me!  The column first published in the Northwest Florida Daily News on July 26, 2007. That was 470 issues ago, and we’re still going strong. You can read all the way back to Issue #1 in the column archive on my website over at ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com!). To all of you who have hung in there with the column for so long, thank you for being fans!

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 Q: I have an HP Laptop running Windows7. After an update, the sound no longer works. When I go to device manager and test sound, it informs me that device is properly working. I get the response no test tone detected. I have tried updating the driver to no avail. By the way, I love your Sunday column. Thanks for any input you might have.

– Jimmy D.
Odessa, Texas

A: I’m happy to hear you’re such an avid reader, Jimmy! IGTM has been publishing in your paper, the Odessa American, since September 26, 2010. I don’t get a whole lot of questions from your neck of the woods, so I’m happy to take a crack at yours.

Although you said this occurred after an update, it’s still a good idea to make sure that you have the latest versions of all relevant Windows updates, as well as updates from HP that may include codecs as well as the audio drivers that you already checked. I suspect that what happened is that something that got updated has default settings that differ from the settings your system needs. It should be a simple matter to tweak them back to where they belong.

After you’ve verified that you have the latest of everything, go to the Control Panel and double click on “Sound”. Click the “Playback” tab, and you should see at least two playback devices listed. Click the one named “Speakers and Headphones” to highlight it, and click “Properties”. In the Properties dialog, select the “General” tab, and make sure the “Device usage:” control is set to “Use this device (enable)”. Click over to the “Levels” tab, and make sure the volume is turned up, and that the speakers are not muted (there should not be a little red circle with a slash on the speaker button). If you click over to the “Advanced” tab, you can select a default format for shared mode. Rather than mess with these controls, just click “Restore Defaults” to have everything set to a reasonable working value. You can now click the Test button to hear if your audio is working (and it should be if you followed all these instructions). If you still don’t have any sound, try plugging a pair of amplified speakers or headphones into the headphone jack. If you’re still having trouble after all this, try contacting me again, and I’ll see what else I can come up with.

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Q: I have created Open Office documents that I would like to delete individually. I have tried to search online for a way to do this without success.

– Nancy C.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: OpenOffice documents are merely files like any other files, Nancy. You can delete them individually or in groups by using Windows Explorer, navigating to wherever you’ve saved the files, selecting them with the mouse, and hitting the [Del] key on your keyboard. You can also rename or delete files from within OpenOffice itself. Visit tinyurl.com/IGTM-0470 to be taken to a page in the OpenOffice wiki that provides additional instructions.