Inspiron Volume Controls

steviec

Got an Inspiron 6400 last week, lovely machine, completely happy with it apart from one thing that's annoying me.

The volume controls, why are they connected to software rather than directly to the speakers? This just seems so overly complicated. Now it's my first laptop and from what I see it's not that unusual with laptops but it just seems odd to me.

Typical problem: I'm in windows, browsing the web or whatever, I turn down the volume to a bare minimum while I do so(in case of annoying flash ads )... So, this brings the windows volume control in the system tray down to a bare minimum. The thing is, when I open media player, suddenly the volume controls on my laptop don't operate system volume but instead they operate Media Player's. So I'm watching a DVD, trying to turn it up, and wondering why it's not working. Reason being that Media Player is already turned up to the max but windows is still turned down. So I have to minimise Media Player to make a change, and usually resort to just doing it manually with the mouse and not bothering with the buttons on the laptop because they're too awkward. The lack of an on screen display to know what level I'm setting sound to doesn't help either!

So, aside from that rant, I thought I'd ask if anyone knew of software that you can run in the background and makes sure your volume controls always work System-Wide and gives you a nice little OSD to go with it, that would be very handy!

I don't want to complain too much, it's a fantastic laptop in general at a very cheap price, this just seems like a very odd design decision.

steviec

Anybody? I'm still looking

Tony H

are you talking about the volume control in the front ? if you are when you adjust or mute the volume you should see that happening at the right hand corner of the screen , it shows the volume in real time