About 6 months ago I bought a new Dell laptop that runs something called IDT High Definition Audio CODEC as the sound driver/controller. One feature that I liked about it was that the mixer (that you open at the bottom right corner of the task bar) would add a new slider pot for every piece of software you had open that could produce sound. Even better, it remembered what you set, so if you muted or adjusted the volume on the mixer for something, every time you opened it again it would retain those settings.
A couple of months later I made the mistake of buying MS Word and Excel and I noticed the very next day after installing them that this individualized memory function was gone from the mixer. It still remembered what your overall volume setting was, and whether you had muted all sound, but any single program you opened would have to be adjusted or muted. Talking to an MS service rep for this and other problems, he swore up and down there was no way at all the MS products could have caused this problem. Sure, I thought. Anyway, he did suggest I should try reinstalling the CODEC, which I did, but without improvement. A couple of months later I found there was an updated version available, so I installed that too. There actually was a substantial performance improvement in my sound, but the memory function didn’t come back.
Now, just today, not doing anything at all with the sound driver or anything else, the memory function returned. Like out of the blue, all on its own. The only reason I found out it is that I opened a game I play pretty regularly, and found that I didn’t have to mute it like I’ve had to for months now.
Oh, FYI, I’ve looked though all the tabs and details and “advanced” buttons on the sound controller, and never found any switch that turns this memory on or off, or even mentions it for that matter. And I have decent anti-virus software that screens pretty much every day, so I don’t think that is the problem.
So, how can this software forget how to do something for months, and then suddenly remember how to do it again, without fiddling with it at all.
Just as an aside, one thing I really like about this computer and this software is that if I can hear something online, I can make a very high quality recording of it, which is something a lot of computers (including my previous one) can’t do.