Travelmate 8204 WLMi Sound Driver

I have a Travelmate 8204 WLMi... it came with XP, and the sound driver or whatever that it had let me choose from a variety of speaker arrangements... 5.1, 7.1, etc.

Ever since I installed Vista, no matter what I do, I can't choose any speaker arrangements, and the Realtek HD audio things I download don't really help much.

Also, Windows says I have an output for "high definition audio" on a jack that doesn't exist....

Anyone?

 

High Def Audio comes out of the headphone jack (if I recall, although I've never bothered to figure out how to use it).

Other than that.... well... my only real comment is Vista... FEH

(sorry, no idea, I refuse to touch vista with a traditional 10' D&D Pole).

Random note, in XP it's under the speaker properties for sound just in the general control panel? Maybe it's hiding in a similar place in Vista?

 

Nope, it's nowhere to be found... I've looked everywhere.

Vista is pretty and all, but it's trash. It's taken me a while to realize that.

The only good thing about it is faster startups and easier daily tasks... browsing etc... but when I try to play games to get audio/video stuff to work correctly, it's just a nightmare.

Are there any other drivers for my computer besides the Realtek ones?

 

Don't believe so, Realtek made the chipset so those are (to the best of my knowledge) the only drivers.

Faster startups I find are made easily possible through using standby rather than shutdown (my startup time is probably about 3 seconds right now)

You say that some things are easier? Out of interest, any notes on what (or how)

 

I have Vista Ultimate on my D:\ drive and find it very useful for maintenance tasks - defragging the XP volume, scanning for viruses when I suspect something's wrong, etc.

Other than that - it works very badly on the 8204. I think it's just really buggy. A friend bought a brand new Acer and Vista is slow as a dog on that machine too, despite certainly having all correct drivers. Vista stinks, that's all. I'll try it again come SP2.

Don't know about the sound drivers - I never had much use for this feature. I always had effects turned off.

 

Normal stuff like internet browsing and work processing just seem to run smoother and faster... plus everything looks better. Most other programs besides games just seem to work more efficiently and faster (after you get them to work properly of course).

The only gripe I have about general computing with Vista is the copy/move thing... copying in XP was 20 times faster than copying in Vista... plus the little "time remaining" dialog box in Vista doesn't say anything until 20 seconds before completion, and even then it's wrong.

Anyways, I just went back to an old, old Realtek driver... the once Acer provided right when Vista came out. R1.51 or something like that. It still doesn't work, so I've given up.