Faint Sound on AOA150

I am hearing impaired (hearing aid user) and have trouble hearing my Acer One AOA150-1777. The sound just seems very faint, even a friend of mine stated that the sound seemed lower then it should be. I'm running W7-RC (Build 7100) using the included Microsoft Drivers for Sound, I haven't tried the RealTek drivers in the W7 forum yet. I have also tried XP and Ubuntu 9.04 and they both seem to be faint as well, but that seemed to depend on the running application.

Anyways are there any tools/utilities to force the volume to be a bit higher? I've heard of folks running a gateway BIOS, but i was unable to find what that actually effects minus screen brightness settings.

And yes the volume is at 100%.

 

hi.....the sound from the stock AA1 is very low compared to other computers. The only application/player i know of that may help is VLC media player. Despite being able to play just about any media file, it can also force your sound to 200%.

Not sure if its what you are looking for, but it helped me with my old laptop (also acer....!!)

just google vlc media player and you're sure to find it....

Hope this helps,
Cheers

 

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

here we go.....just select a mirror and away you go

 

I'll load VLC tonight, thanks for that recommendation.

But i'm looking for something to override the overall system volume. I use the laptop in my car for Microsoft Streets and Trips and the voice navigation is very faint there also.

 

Probably the only thing to do to get a substantial increase in volume is amplified speakers or maybe an interface to you car stereo, if your stereo doesnt have a mp3 connection you could try one of the wireless fm or cassette connections.

 

You can use a thing called SRS audio sandbox to increase your volume a little bit. You can also adjust it so it makes the voice navigation's voice clearer and easier to hear.

 

I might have partially fixed the problem. I had done some research and found that Windows cannot override hardware controls for sound, like the FN+volume up/down on our keyboards. So even if Windows volume is at 100% it's only 100% of what your hardware is set at. I think mine may have been about half way, I hit the FN+VolumeUp a dozen times or so (since i don't have onscreen notification with W7) then played an video file from several locations, all were loud enough that i had to turn them down. I haven't tested the navigation yet but i will do that this evening.

Thanks to all who repiled!

 

The sound volume depends a lot on the distro/version and even desktop manager. Mandriva 2009.1 and Fedora 11 preview give much higher sound that Fedora 10. Also it seems to me that Fedora 10 Gnome is different from Fedora 10 LXDE.