Category Archives: Gaming

Computer games, other games.. whatever as long as you can play it…

ROG, Realtek and Windows 11, oh my!

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If you’ve used a home-built PC with Realtek HD audio built-in on Windows in the last decade, you’ve likely experienced frustration or even an inability to get sound working on your machine. Windows 11 is no different and is arguably broken out of the box on some systems. My particular experience was based on a machine upgraded from Win10, but even fully removing the drivers, deleting the device and rebooting produced the same outcome, so take that as you will.

I didn’t expect audio to work after the upgrade given Microsoft’s history with Realtek drivers in the past, (and I wasn’t wrong) but I also didn’t expect it to be as difficult to get working. Firstly with Windows 11, Microsoft introduced a feature called “vulnerable driver protection” which attempts to save users from themselves. Sadly it works poorly and in this case even breaks the Realtek drivers sourced directly from Microsoft’s own servers.

My goal with this was simple, 1) get the realtek drivers working at a basic level, 2) try to get full functionality of my built-in audio ports equal to what I had in Windows 10. I had a strong suspicion that one of the drivers the above feature was blocking, AsIO.sys was part of the issue. That driver is responsible for processing audio streams and is provided by the Realtek/Asus ROG driver package. The steps I took to get audio working were as follows:

  1. Disable vulnerable driver protection
  2. Delete audio devices from Device Manager
  3. Remove the installed drivers
  4. Install the Asus ROG audio driver package downloaded from their site

This got sound working, but only basic stereo sound from the rear outputs. The driver package also installs something called the “Realtek Audio Console.” This program allows you to enable some of the other features like front panel i/o. In my case I had to disable automatic detection and manually set the headphone out and mic in ports under “Device Advanced Settings.” This also exposed the full list of inputs and outputs in case I ever need to use them in the future.

Once working, this still took some tweaking to get the settings similar to what I had in Windows 10. One thing that’s worse is the available volume range for the headphones. The amplification is set extremely low requiring a much higher volume setting than in the prior version of Windows, but at least it works.

Hey Microsoft! Do Better.

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The title might seem a little over the top, but let me explain. This afternoon, I had one thing I wanted to do. I wanted to sit in my racing sim and practice. A seemingly simple thing, right? The thing is, I hadn’t sat down at my sim in about a month. (life has been a bit busy lately) As I expected, I had some AV updates that needed to be applied… no problem. The batteries on my wireless mouse were giving out… annoying, but again, no problem. The system seemed super sluggish after doing the AV updates, so took a look at oh, yep… a bunch of updates from Microsoft. No problem, I’ll let these install and then I’ll play I thought. Oh, how naive of me.

I should have known something was up earlier, but I let my trust in the update process get the better of me. You see, earlier I’d loaded up a piece of software that controls the haptic feedback on my seat and it had a problem because it couldn’t find the output device. The output device is a small usb audio interface that sends analog signals to an amplifier that drives a transducer, which in turn makes the seat vibrate. This sudden change was a result of driver updates, something that I’d specifically disabled. (for reasons that will soon become apparent) That seemed weird, but the device was still there and I just had to re-select it.

The second thing that should’ve tipped me off was an NVidia driver update coming through Windows Update. Strange I thought… I’m sure I disabled that. (I had previously) Still, I thought… what’s the harm. It probably needs it anyway. What I didn’t see was one of the other update packages contained a driver update for the onboard audio. This had already completed, but the worst part was that in the process of updating, it removed the user interface that allows you to configure things like surround sound. I checked the properties for Sonic Studio 3 and found that the application was missing, but there was a handy menu to install it. Awesome! (it wasn’t awesome)

Clicking this menu brought me immediately to the listing for this application on the Microsoft store, but when I clicked it the download immediately failed and told me to log in. I tried to do that and was met with a progress wheel that timed out and failed. This happens when you use a local account with Windows and don’t log in to Microsoft’s services. Ok, annoying, but I’ll just go to the Asus ROG driver page and download them I thought. What I got from the manufacturer support site was a driver-only download. Cue a bunch of searching through forums until I find a link to a slightly older version of the same driver package with the entire suite. (also hosted on the manufacturer site)

What happened became apparent at this point. Asus has moved current & future versions of this application/driver package onto the Microsoft store and removed it from their own support page. This has the effect of tying continuing support of their products to Microsoft’s services. It also revealed that Microsoft is continuing to reset certain settings on your computer to their factory defaults without notice or warning in what are supposed to be security & quality updates. Microsoft, if you’re listening… this is how you erode user trust.

While I’d managed to turn off driver & application updates via Windows Update (again) and had fixed the sound issues… I was done. This whole debacle cost me over an hour of my time, by which point I was so disgusted I didn’t even want to do the one thing I’d sat down to do in the first place.

Sony – still hijacking your machine, now with SecuROM

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You’d think after the huge fiasco over Sony’s use of First 4 Internet’s XCP product several years ago, sony would have changed course a bit.  Instead Sony decided to bring their DRM efforts in house and out popped SecuROM.  Again, they use the same rootkit tactics to secretly install their software.  This makes SecuROM difficult to detect and even more difficult to remove.  Sony was sued, and settled in the previous case(s).  There are several suits pending against EA Games for use of the SecuROM DRM software.  I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before Sony gets served.  When will they learn?