Vista Volume Mixer -- Green Bar Won't Go Very High

I don’t know if it’s always been like this or not but I just noticed it. When I open my Volume Mixer (the standard one that comes with Vista) and turn the “speakers” device all the way up, the green bar (the one that indicates actual sound volume given the volume setting you’ve indicated) only rises up about a sixth of the way to the top.

Is this normal?

-FrL-

So the reason this even came up was because my wife told me the computer had stopped playing back sound, which indeed it had.

But now the problem is fixed, and also, there is no longer a green bar in the Volume Mixe at all.

I don’t know exactly how I fixed it. I went into the settings dialoge for the card manufacturer and hit some button labled “default” and all of a sudden everything was working.

That’s fine. But I wonder why there’s no longer a green bar. Any ideas?

-FrL-

Okay, never mind, my previous two posts were posted under the influence of some severe misconceptions.

I thought the green bar indicates maximum possible volume, but it actually gives a live indication of actual volume. I didn’t realize this, in part, because whatever the problem was, it was apparently causing the computer to playback (or think it was playing back, since I couldn’t hear anything) a steady, constant stream of sound at a constant volume. This meant that whatever setting I put the volume at, the green bar would stay frozen at a corresponding lower point on the volume indicator.

Well anyway, now that I’ve pushed “default,” whatever that did, everything’s behaving normally, and there is a green bar, behaving as it ought to behave.

-FrL-

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