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Microphone does not work in Steam on Macbook under Windows


Looks like the drivers for Cirrus Logic audio card in unibody Macbook from late 2009 (also known as MacBook 6,1) are a bit broken. This is on Windows XP. I'm running Boot Camp 3.0 because 3.1's installer crashes. Anyways, microphone in Steam and Steam edition of Torchlight just didn't work. From certain posts on Apple forums, this seems to affect other software -- Windows Live Messenger, et al.

Henry Wong has hacked the drivers for Macbook Pro for Cirrus Logic 4602A, and got this to work. Grab the fixed drivers from their site. 

Despite being for MBP, this seems to work on my unibody Macbook as well. This advice is offered without any guarantee it'll work and it's definitely not supported by Apple, so be careful.


PS Post 200!


Edit April 25th 2010:
Mirror of fixes: regular fix, no s/pdif out fix

Edit May 7th 2010:
After using these patches for some time in L4D2 and elsewhere, I conclude that one or both of the fixed drivers are breaking stereo support, to a certain extent. That is, apparently the "rear" speaker or even the microphone becomes the "left" speaker. YMMV.
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About me

Unibody Macbook 2009 - NVIDIA 9400m support for PhysX

Since 9400m has 16 CUDA cores, newer releases of PhysX system software do not support hardware acceleration on it. In newer releases, NVIDIA demands 256MB of memory on the GPU and 32 CUDA cores. 


But if you need it for development, testing or just for trying how it works and proving to yourself you can do it... grab old drivers from NVIDIA to get PhysX running on your machine. I've tried 9.09.0408.

Beware, NVIDIA's Fluid Demo is still abysmally slow so I'm not sure if there's any point. (Although I suspect this has more to do with it rendering 60000 particles than with anything else.)

You'll need to manually uninstall the PhysX drivers that ship with your GPU drivers. If you don't see them in Add/Remove Programs, then install the latest version of PhysX drivers (not your GPU drivers) and then uninstall.
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Windows Product Activation - "significant hardware changes"


I've just had a run-in with deactivation of Windows XP due to "significant hardware changes since the copy was last activated". But, since I installed XP, the only thing I did was remove 512MB of RAM in the laptop, and install 1GB of RAM. I also plugged in the USB mouse during the bootup.


What probably triggered it, however, was changing filesystem of the system partition from FAT32 to NTFS using Microsoft's own convert.exe, included with Windows. I have no idea where they're pulling out the idea that filesystem of root system partition is a hardware thing.

I have no idea if this reactivation ate one of my activation slots for this product key, since Microsoft's Knowledge Base link on the subject appears down. I surely hope I won't have to deal with tech support; I've heard they're friendly and unintrusive in Croatia, but still...

(By the way, unusually for tech-savvy Croats, this is a legit copy. From MSDNAA and FER, of course :-)

Since there's no way I could have captured the messagebox that appears during login (this isn't a VM and I don't have a good camera) included is just a leftover shot of WGA, after repeated activation.
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Slow logoff in Windows XP - hang on "Saving your settings"

If you have problems with Windows XP logging off -- that is, the system inexplicably decides to wait for about a minute before it proceeds with log off or shutdown -- you may want to give Microsoft's UPHclean - User Profile Hive Cleanup Service a spin. It just helped me with this problem that was harassing me for the past full calendar year.


It installs as a service so it'll keep working.

Now, I wonder why this service is not included in Windows themselves, or at least in a service pack - why ship a broken OS?

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Windows XP EULA is quite complex

And don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You have to read between the lines letters. Each simple Latin letter, each simple glyph in fact consists of such fractal-like complexity that each one can stand for itself and tell the world a story of biblical proportions.

Behold:

test

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