Aspire 7730 subwoofer volume

I've got an Aspire 7730 which is about a month old. Everything is working fine except the subwoofer seems to be very weak. You need to put your ear up against it to hear anything at all so it's more or less useless as is. My brother's 5920 has a very good subwoofer and the sound output is excellent from it.

Would anyone know if this is normal for the 7730 or do I have a faulty subwoofer?

 

I think the 7730 and the 5930 models have smaller subwoofers than the 7720 and the 5920 models, so it might just be weak. I have a 5920G, and to hear the subwoofer I have to do what you said.

You can contact Acer because it can still be a faulty subwoofer, but I think a better option is to get external speakers or headphones. I'm now using them, and I won't return again to Acer's speakers. It's a huge difference. Sometimes it's a hassle to do anything with Acer's service.

 

My brother's 5920G is almost an identical spec to yours except his has 4GB of RAM and a 250GB hard disk, but as I said his subwoofer is pretty impressive.

Agree 100% on Acer's service, I work for a company who sell Acer laptops and the last time we sent one off (a 5920 with a bad LCD cable) it took a month to come back! Plus I've the added difficulty of having bought this one in Austria, it's a German model, so Acer UK might not honour the warranty on it. I guess I'll have to consider if it's a big enough problem to do without my laptop for a month.

 

My cousin has a 5520G which doesn't have a subwoofer, and the only difference is that mine has slightly more detailed sound. Still, any stereo headphones or external speakers will blow you away. I use some cheap headphones with no brand and some old Trust SoundForce 1000P speakers and the result is huge. They gave life to my music and games. And some newer speakers like the Logitech X-230 will have an even better sound.

OK, I'm not trying to make you buy headphones or speakers, but if you want better sound, then this might be the only way.

 

Well I do have a good set of headphones so it's not too big an issue. Even with the subwoofer being weak, the sound from the internal speakers is still better than the Dell Studio 1737 I had, the sound out of that was horrible. I'll probably let it be, was just curious if it is normal for this particular model.

 

So you already have headphones? Is there any difference between them and the laptop's speakers?

 

Yes they are better than the speakers, just not always viable to use them though.

 

I just came across something regarding this.

When I bought this laptop I took out the original hard disk and used my own, installing Windows XP on it. Today I decided to try the original OS (Windows Vista Home Premium in German) - the subwoofer works extremely well. However in a clean install of Windows 7 it doesn't work either so it must be some sort of software problem. Now to figure out what it is.

 

It took me 5 months but I finally solved the problem.

It turns out that I have to install the driver that came with the laptop and I have to use the setup.exe to install it rather than updating it through Device Manager. Once I do this then I can update to a newer one and it keeps working.

I never thought of using the original software as the copy of Windows I received was in German so didn't use it for very long, I know enough German to get me by but wouldn't fancy using it in my OS.