voice and IM programs

use yahoo.... I was told it is better but I haven't used it yet

Are you connected to the web via a dial up modem or do you have a high speed connection (cable, dsl)? I use windows messenger flawlessly to talk to my two brothers all the time. There is never a disconnect unless I am hanging up on one of them!

eventually the connection problem was traced to firewall problems.

messenger doesnt half want to open a lot of connections to a lot of places.

i am connecting using a 56k modem, and was pleasently surprised to find how well it worked, when it worked


the remaining problem is that at my end the voice signal is lost and all i get through my headphones is static.

this tends to be about 20 - 50% of the time, in short bursts. since this only seems to be at my end i think it may be a hardware problem. just a case of figuring out what the problem now, since i thought both the speakers and headphones were fine *shrug*

*thinking*
I use MS Messenger daily for voice chat and it's amazing. Regarding the lost voice signals, hmmm... I don't know if IM uses any hardware acceleration with it's sound but you can try and turn your sound acceleration down a notch and see if that helps. If not, let me know and I'll get more info and look into it a little more I have the resources; it's what I do )

thanks for the offer of assistance!

i will try and remember to test the headphones with a DVD tonight, and have another go with messanger over the next 2 or 3 days.

it would be nice to get this fixed

well, first results are in.

while off line and messanger not running, sound playback through the headphones is flawless.

this suggests either the problem is being on line, or a program i was only running while on line, eg messanger.

Asimo, i have turned hardware accel down by one notch on audio, but it hasnt made any difference to the sound problem with messenger.

i have closed all running programs, except messenger and window blinds, but this also didnt help.

bandwidth monitor says bandwidth usage is only 1/3 to 1/2 of whats available on my 56k modem.

as i said earlier the headphones and speakers all seem fine.

could it be a problem at the other end???

any suggestions gratefully received.

Have you tried to talk to several different people or just one so far? Either way, toss me some system specs and I can look into it a little further, particularly sound card type and driver version, and firewall type/name. I wonder how much this has to do with the firewall? I had an instance where a firewall would log me off of messenger if I wasn’t actively using it (messenger). Is it possible for you to test this w/o the firewall to rule that out?

You know, there was a messenger audio fix posted on Windows Update a while back. Did you happen to pick that up? It fixed a ‘hissing’ sound at the end of some of the log-on/log off events… just a thought…

Asimo, the system details are as follows:

my firewall is "atguard 3.22"
currently i am simply disabling the firewall when using messenger, since creating rules to only let through some of its activities is proving to be a pain. the number of different ports and adresses it wants to contact seems rather excessive to me *sigh*

as for the sound card, my machine has onboard sound on the motherboard, and a creative labs sound card in a PCI slot.

i have set the onboard sound card to disabled in the bios, but this doesnt seem to stop winXP detecting it. so i have simply avoided installing the drivers for it

acording to winXP device manager, the sound card is:
Creative AudioPCI (ES1370) SB PCI 64/128 (WDM)

as memory serves, it is a "Creative Labs PCI 128"

again via device manager, the driver details are:
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Date: 01/07/2001
Driver Version: 5.1.2535.0
Driver Signer: Microsoft Windows XP Publisher

i have only used messenger to talk to one person, so i dont know if i would get the problem with other people.

according to messenger, we are both running the latest versions.

i tried checking to see if there were any problems with audio playback (using an mp3 file in windows media player) when messenger was running, but the two programs seemed to be clashing over who had access to the sound output channel, and i got either one or the other working, but no static from media player.

some times the static problem is worse than others. my instinctive reaction is to suspect a problem with the other persons mic, but i dont have any evidence to back this up.

strange you should say that

following what looked like a total network meltdown, windows messenger was totally useless at the weekend.

so in a fit of desperation we tried yahoo messenger.

first results are very good. only problem was by the time we had it all sorted out and started talking again, it was nearly 2am local time for me, and i passed out

on the static problem, trying a different mic at the other end seems to have fixed it. however, since we spent several hours fruitlessly arguing with MSN, we didn't spend a lot of time proving this.

oh yes, and the final irony was that we could text chat using trillian logging into MSN with no problems, even though messenger was dead in the water

I'm not especially good at this subject and i didn't have the strength to read all in this topic but i have a prog that is pretty hadny i think...:
www.teamsound.com

Check it out=)