Monthly Archives: May 2007

Sound for Windows 2003 Server

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Recently I needed to add sound capability (to hear alerts) to a Windows 2003 Server. The motherboard didn’t have an integrated sound, and I was running short of PCI slots. Additionally I soon discovered that most sound cards available today don’t declare support for Windows 2003, though for many one can find suggestions on the net “to try to see if Windows recognizes the card as the proprietary drivers supplied with the card won’t work.”

Poking around for a while I came across SiiG USB SoundWave 7.1 which comes with driver support for Windows 2003 and it doesn’t take up a PCI slot. Problem solved. Installation was a breeze (once I realized no sounds can be heard over Remote Desktop..).

The only remaining snag was that when I plugged the USB SoundWave output to an auxiliary input in an older Cambridge SoundWorks speaker set, I was blasted with an amplitude that seemed to have been set to “11″. The speakers use an in-line volume control, and of course only one such cable was provided with the speaker set (and that cable was already in use with a workstation PC). Even when the sound was turned to Very Low in the mixer, the pops and cracks when the system reboots and the USB SoundWave initializes were deafening (being fed at line level to the amp). Some more Googling produced a small accessory cable which, once arrived, installed, and turned about half-way down, fixed the problem.

Blog is as blog does..

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Couple of years ago when I originally set up this blog I decided to leave the charter of the blog initially undefined. That was not such a great idea; what’s the motivation to write in a blog without a purpose? Unless a blog has a known readership (friends, relatives, co-workers..) there’s not even a certainty that anyone will ever read the words that were written. Bulletin boards are a bit different; especially if you frequent a board, you tend to know at least some of the other board users — there is a sense of community. Blogs, on the other hand, are sort of like a endless monologue (give or take an occasional comment).

But one thought I often come back to is: what would be the easiest way to contribute to the “collective mind” of the internet. So often I come across either a complete solution, or a sufficient hint toward a solution, to a tough technical problems. And every now and then I come up with a similar solution that at least I think is clever :) . So now this blog has a charter: it is mainly a technical blog where I can post such discoveries and solutions that, once indexed, hopefully will at some point help someone scratching their head with a similar issue.

In other words, welcome to the second (or is the third?) incarnation of this blog!