Finally… working mic in Vista

So, I finally have the full use of my microphone and audio system on my gaming PC. It only took a complete reinstallation of Vista and three weeks of banging my head, but hey, who am I to complain?

Well, I’ll tell you: I’m someone who detests time wasting. Reinstalling my operating system was a waste of time. Whose fault was it? Well, I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of the following three parties: Asus, Microsoft, Valve.

1. Asus, because their shitty driver package can’t uninstall itself properly. I originally made use of the onboard sound on my Asus motherboard, and I uninstalled it to make way for my new Asus soundcard. Unbeknownst to me, the uninstall feature of the drivers was for diddlysquat. It uninstalled the annoying configuration application, and that’s about it. There were registry entires and dll files strewn all through my system and I had no idea where or how many.
2. Microsoft, because obviously their driver management is too hard for some companies (Asus, but I’m sure there are others: why do so many driver cleaner apps exist?). Really, it’s not very hard. In Linux, many device drivers are a single binary blob, or in the case of open-source drivers, a binary blob with source attached. You load it with one command, and you unload it with one command. When you want to uninstall it (ie, remove it completely), you just delete the file. Bingo! All gone. Upgrade to your hearts content. Not with Windows.
3. Valve, because their software’s configuration options could not be more limiting or vague. Sure, I selected the correct mic input in Steam, but did that have any effect on the games themselves? No. Know why? Because they were ignoring settings from Steam. They tried to be too smart and they messed up, because whatever configuration I tried, the games themselves insisted on trying to grab input from a device which no longer existed (my old onboard sound).

But hey, who am I to criticize? Oh that’s right, I’m a paying customer. Fuck your shitty drivers, Asus. Fuck your shitty driver management, Microsoft. And fuck you, to a lesser extent, Valve, for making your software so damn vague.

Now that my rant’s over, I can talk about the problem I was having: uninstalling my old onboard soundcard software didn’t completely remove all of the hooks it left, well, everywhere. So there were dll files and registry settings and who knows what else ruining a lot of things. This lead to my Source-based games (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead) not being able to initialise the microphone, with the following printed to the console when trying to configure audio options:

Unable to initialize DirectSoundCapture. You won’t be able to speak to other players.

It also left Unreal Tournament 3 completely unplayable, as it would lock up before even entering the main menu, presumably due to the game trying to make use of an OpenAL audio device which no longer existed. There is a file located in the Windows system directory which you can delete to resolve this issue, but the forum post describing this procedure escapes my Google-fu at this time. I do recall it was related to solving issues with Creative X-Fi audio cards and OpenAL.

So, in the end I finally have a fully working Vista gaming system. And people say Windows is “user friendly”, ha!