I made the mistake last night of applying the latest Windows Updates to my Windows Vista (SP1) Acer Laptop. Now the external headphone jack doesn't work. There was always an issue with that, well documented on the Net, but easily recovered from by putting the system to "sleep" and coming back....Voila!....sound. Plus it didn't happen very often.
Not any more.
Now, when I start both Firefox and Safari, I lose the sound on the external port and can't get it back without fiddlng around for an hour...only to lose it again next time I start both browsers and do something like play a video on YouTube. At least, that's what I suspect. I can't get the sound going often enough to test it out.
The "sleep" fix no longer works because the sleep and hibernate functions no longer work. Well, maybe one in 10 attempts will see "sleep" work and even then half the time I still don't get the sound back. I haven't worked out what sequence of steps would be required to make that predictable....if there is one. The system quiesces to either state, but the power button light doesn't go out so the only way to come back is to remove the battery and re-boot or hold the power button down for more than 5 seconds and force the system to power off, effectively crashing it.
Don't you love wasting time on stuff that should just work? Maybe Apple really is the way to go. I'm sick of this. Meanwhile, I'll roll back to a checkpoint backup I did last week.....though that often doesn't work either for reasons that remain obscure. Or it says it fails, but the problem is fixed....so it did SOMETHING.
[UPDATE: Restored to a checkpoint from 3 days ago and the problem is fixed. Sleep works fine and that gave me my sound back. But it leaves me wondering if I can ever again update my system.....]
[UPDATE 2: Also realised the update had broken my network printing. After the restore, my network printing to a WinXP system works once again.]
Daily review 15/09/2025
4 hours ago
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