Need driver for built-in microphone for Aspire One - XP ver

My microphone is not working. I looked around like crazy for a driver for my Aspire One Windows XP version with 120GB, but can't find any.

Basically the mic is not working. My netbook is 10 days old. Any ideas?

 

the driver is on the Acer website (and its the audio driver, there is no specific driver for the mic).
the reason why it may not be working as expected has been explained several times in several other threads.
use the search function on this forum and you'll get the answers you need.

 

I talked to Acer tech support several weeks and they said I should look for a mic driver not audio driver. They list none in their website. This is why i posted here. I have also gone thru the postings in this forum to no avail. None helped. And I am an intermediate user with several years of using computers since 1977. So "unchecking the muted box in the box" will not help. That mic is not working and many other users who have reported the same problem with their Acer One seem to be having the same problem. I looked elsewhere in the net, I googled for this problem, same thing. Not much help.

 

By the way, I skeptically reinstalled the Realtek audio driver from the Acer website, and it did not help. Just as I thought. I have used a variety of programs that should have enabled the mic and it is not working. I went to Device Manager to test the mic, and the audio levels are not moving at all in the Microsoft test for the microphone device. This should not require a science degree to operate that little built-in microphone.

 

man, I know it doesnt make much sense to me either, i tried them all but i have to say despite the fact that the levels were not moving in my AAO as well, at a certain stage it did start to work.
Muting/unmuting and gererically changing the level of the mic worked for me once. Uninstalling audio drivers, then cleaning. rebooting and running the setup.exe of the audio package from acer helped once too.
It did not help installing the drivers (both acers and realtek, several versions) from the device manager.
I nLited all the drivers except the audio one, and for the moment I am going to reinstall those manually.
Whenever I will have some more time I will try to inspect the original package from Acer to try understand if there is some type of customization made that makes them work.
Sorry I couldnt help better.
N

 

Hi,

I Have the solution for this problem. I recently put XP pro on my AAO and installed all my drivers and everything seemed to work well .... until i tried to use skype.

I tried to use my microphone, and it would only slightly pickup a trace of audio if i tapped on the mic, but that was it. My bluetooth head set mic would not pic up either. So i searched around the net for a solution, and someone had recommended downloading Realtek audio drivers version 1.78. After finding the drivers, i uninstalled my sound drivers, restarted my computer, installed the 1.78 drivers, and voila, problem solved! :-D I hope this helps!

Download link:

http://freewarelist.net/realtek-high-definition-audio.html

 

Did anybody tried this?
Does it really work?
I cannot download the driver from the link

 

You need to select the link that says:

Download XP
From Software Author.

on the page. Give that a try, if it doesn't work i can post a link to download from off my home server.

[/quote:ldlqbwnr]

 

After reading previous posts, and having the same problem, I did a bit of experimenting.

Realtek has a driver WDM_R211.exe on their website. Downloaded, installed and no help -- still could not get any sound out after talking to the machine -- actually worse that the one that came with the unit.

Rolled back to the original driver.

Looked around on the web and found a free download site (don't remember the name, but found through the EEPC forum) which had the WDM_178.exe driver. Downloaded, installed and happy days! I actually had to decrease the mic volume setting.

Interesting that the later driver did not work!

 

OK same problem here on a brand new AA1. No mic response at all - none.

Have now gone to the suggested free download site and found the WDM_R178 file from software author. Downloaded but the download failed, said the file was corrupted. Tried going to the author's site - very confusing and no obvious link to what I needed. So I called Acer. Tech acted like he'd never heard of a microphone, thought maybe there are some controls I could find to make it work, adjust the volume. Only took two questions before he was confused beyond reason and had to go ask questions. Lots of quality hold time listening to righteous elevator music. Four different notes cycling over and over for fifteen minutes!

Finally transfered to a Level Two technician, deleted Realtek driver, reinstalled - no change. Trying to explain this is a known common problem and requires a new driver - tech does a great impression of a brick wall. Thirty minutes on hold now, but much better music - things are improving...

New guy, also never heard of this. Grabs a similar machine to check it out, his works so what's my problem? Did I check my mouse? Calls drops. Aint we got fun?

I called back and did the hold thing again. By now I'm whistling along with the music. Thirty minutes. Then it got handled fast! She informed me the reason it doesn't work is that it is designed not to work. Isn't supposed to work. Only in messenger will it work, and was not intended for any other purpose. If I want to risk it I can download a driver, but she recommends against that, and won't suggest any.

Great company huh?

 

Well if that's the case then how come the internal mic works perfect on the one I just bought from Wal-Mart? The three that I had previously bought from Costco did not work. Something is different between the two units, but I don't know what it is. Skype works great on mine.

 

Thanks Craig07. Replacing the 1.94 drivers with the 1.78 drivers dramatically improved the input level of the microphone.

My AA1 is a 150-1570, manufactured 08/2008. Hopefully Acer and/or Realtek will somehow fix the issue in future drivers.

*Edit
Also see this post:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8968

Which suggests that the current and/or newer drivers may be used if Acoustic Echo Cancellation is disabled in the Realtek HD Sound Effect Manager (in Control Panel), although this method does not work on my 150-1570. The R178 drivers do work on my 150-1570.

 

Problem solved!!! I also installed the 1.78 drivers and the mic finally works pefectly. Downloading the 1.78 drivers was not easy. I found them in a ZIP file after having googled for a while.

 

Do you have the 110 or the 150 AA1? Did you remove the original drivers first with control panel, or just install the 1.78 ones? I'm thinking the process may be important, because nothing I've tried lately works with my 150.

 

I too have tried several versions of drivers to no avail. I wonder if someone at Acer is actively working on this problem since I have noticed that on their download site they have had 2 different new versions of the Realtek driver in the last 2 days. I have tried the driver that came with my machine, plus the 1.78, the 2.11 and the 2.12 and nothing works. I have tried just updating the drivers, and also tried removing, rebooting, and installing the drivers. Nothing makes my microphone work. Of course an external mic works great no matter which Realtek driver I use.

....Fred

 

Hi - I had this problem and after reading this thread went and downloaded the 1.78 driver from the authors site link. Sssllllooooowwww download but worked.
Unzipped it and uninstalled the current driver installed the 1.78 and re-started - no joy it re-installed the Acer version!@!

I made sure I had a new restore point then just double clicked the 1.78 exe - it installed. Re-started and suddenly the mike works just fine in Skype.

I must point out that using the sound recorder in Accessories worked fine with the old driver but the "Test Hardware" in Sound accessories failed.

I'm using a model ZG5 and - NOW - enjoying it.

 

I have 2 A1s at home. Although supposed to be same model, reality is they differ on HDD size as well as webcam CCD, even though I ordered a couple of "supposedly" identical Win XP/1GB/120GB/White.

I was experiencing the "deaf microphone" issue on one of them. Although both had same Realtek Drivers (r1.94 or version 5.10.0.5628) one just refused to get any sound on mic.

I just downloaded r1.78 from the freenet URL provided in previous posts (very sloooow download) and able to get it working. Here's what I did:
1) Downloaded Realtek 1.78 drivers
2) Uninstalled Realtek 1.94 drivers (Start->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager->Sound, video and game controllers->Realtek High definition audio->Driver->Uninstall)
3) Rebooted
4) Once A1 issued a "Found New Hardware on Hi Definition bus", ran r1.78 drivers downloaded in step 1.That cleared out the "Found New HW" notice and asked to reboot.
5) Upon rebooting found Realtek driver 5.10.0.5485 was installed, as well as a different version of the Realtek HD Sound Effect Manager app (Featuring a couple of options in the microphone tab, instead of the single "Acoustic Echo Cancellation" on r1.94 version)
6) Tested mic with sound recorder (Start->All programs->Accessories->Entertainment), but failed, as no sound recognized.
7) On Realtek HD Sound Effect Manager (Start->Control Panel) went to mixer tab and enabled Mic on the Record section (bottom half of page). Shows a yellow button once enabled
8) Re-tested mic as in 6) and worked!! It actually picks much more sound than the other A1 (the one that works with r1.94 drivers)

Being a bit stubborn, reinstalled r1.94 drivers and worked, until A1 was rebooted, and again no sound present. So went back to Sound,...controllers and rolled back driver to r1.78. Restarted and got my mic working back. However also hit a blue screen when shut down and since then every boot was followed by a winlogon error report.

I just completely uninstalled Realtek drivers and did a fresh install on r1.78 and got A1 working OK again (Bear in mind r1.78 defaults to mic disabled in the HD Sound effect Manager App, thus before panicking make sure a yellow button shows just below Mic Volume on the Record section and then test with Sound Recorder). After several reboots, mic still working, no issues, no blue screen, no winlogon report and a still happy owner.

 

Maybe it is just the blue ones that have microphones that don't work. I went through step by step as ccuina did and I still have nothing from the microphone. Of course, like I said, an external mike works just fine. It's possible that I have a bad mike.

 

Kodaker, sad to hear didn't work for you. When I started reading posts on subject matter I wasn't that confident as seemed there was no consistent way to get it working. However, I was wrong and that's why decided to report my findings, specially the need to have mic enabled in Realtek's HD SW, as indicated in step 7) on my previous post. Hadn't I looked into it, I would have thought r1.78 didn't solve issue and kept trying.

I don't think A1 case color has to do with issue, as I have two white units and only one of them wasn't working (the one with 160GB HDD -instead of the 120GB it should have featured). It also features the different CCD, although can't recall out of memory if the "deaf mic" one had the Lite-On CCD. I think besides the HDD and webcam, there are some other little differences amongst what should have been identical A1s and thus driving weird issues, like the "stubborn deaf mike" one. Was yours also expected to be 120GB and came out being 160GB?

As an external mike works for you, I'll bet the audio circuitry is working, thus is either SW issue or a bad mike. I'll think on SW first, given my recent experience. I also found out that even Sound Recording not picking any sound, when I tried to close applet it reported the sound file had changed, thus somehow it knew it should have picked some sound, but just didn't. Are you experiencing same?

Besides r1.78 and r1.94, have you tried any other versions? Maybe I was lucky to have r1.78 solving my issue as had for many others here, and other instances still open are a similar -yet different- issue.

Hope this helps,

 

Yes, mine is one of the ones that was supposed to have 120Gig but had 160Gig. Maybe they gave me the extra disk space instead of a built in microphone. I have tried 1.94, 1.78, 2.12, and 2.13. The last two I got from The Realtek website. I get nothing different from any of these. I do get the message that says the file 'Sound' has been changed after I try to close the sound recorder, but if I play the 'file' I hear nothing and nothing is indicated in the display. I think maybe just telling it to record, it figures that something was recorded.