Dell driver page is unavalible, new BIOS??

The title says it all.
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/alienware-17-r2/drivers/advanced

EDIT: It's back online now without any BIOS updates. Sorry for my rush

 

No worries, we're all hoping for a new BIOS!

 

Fun fact: The whole Alienware line was removed from Dell México website, hmmm

 

When I got the speakers of my 15 repaired the technician told me that the current lineup wasn't supposed to come to Mexico, he didn't know wtf happened. There are lots of 'em on Best Buy, Liverpool, etc.

lol, I just realized you also talk spanish probably

 

Hey, If you don't mind, I wonder what happens with your speakers? Mine works fine but the plug in headphone does not working probably and I find a small dead pixel in the middle of the screen with 2 months laptops. What the hell on earth.

 

Nothing happens with my speakers right now, after the first month with the laptop the speaker on the left started sounding terrible (a lot of rattling ) so I had to turn the bass almost all the way down so I asked here and they told me to call tech support. After a short chat in dell's website they told me they were sending a technician to take a look. Next day at noon a guy arrived at my home and replaced the speakers in like 30 minutes and left, nothing wrong with them since. Amazing customer service IMO (My older laptop was from HP so even the fact that the chat guy knew how to solve my problem blown me away in comparison).

If your laptop is new and you have dead pixels they should replace your screen, use your warranty ASAP.

Also, I also had the headphone problem when I "upgraded" from 8.1 to windows 10, reinstalling the audio driver solved the issue.

 

I'm gonna replace my screen for that thing. Could you tell me what version of audio driver you are installed on your system?

I need to explain about audio clearly. When you plug headphone in, windows should auto adjust the volume down to fit your headphone. So it will not screaming in your ears when you forget to turn down the volume. Mine not works that way.

 

My audio driver doesn't automatically adjust the audio for headphones too. I thought that was something missing in all AW series this year, or is it not?

 

I never experienced such a function in any laptop. ONly that after going from 50% up higher WIndows starts to complain it can damage my ears.

 

I'm not sure. But my friend has AW 17R2 system and he told me that he didn't has this problems. My inspiron can adjust itself, not my xps 17 and this one.

 

You can actually adjust the bass separately for headphones and for the speakers, so the lack of volume control looks like an oversight!

I have the speakers on my 15 set to 60 bass, the default is 40.

When I plug in headphones, the bass goes back to 40, but the volume stays the same!

 

Edit: never mind, figured it out. Separate volume control just didn't strike me as very important

Running ILSpy on SBRcni.exe, that feature is implemented in the C# class SpeakerHeadphonePage. I'm going to track down how the bass behaviour works and see if volume control can be fixed this way.

 

your right, I can see bass adjust itself when plugin headphone, but I don't know what is the meaning of it. I hope you can find out something. Dell always leave the hardest part to the community

 

Oh well, can't blame their engineers for not understanding community needs While I haven't tracked down the callback event that adjusts the bass, I have figured out where it happens, and how to retrieve and control the volume, all inside SBRcni.exe:

Malcolm.SpeakerHeadphonePage class has this function:
UpdateBassManagement(); -> it updates the checkboxes and sliders for bass & crossover frequency

Malcolm.CTAudioLibrary class has these functions:
GetWindowsPlaybackMute
GetWindowsPlaybackVolume

SetWindowsPlaybackMute
SetWindowsPlaybackVolume

They are called by events originating from the volume slider in the MainWindow class (which is basically the control panel you see). Since the volume slider doesn't belong in any particular page, it gets slotted there.

 

You’re really amazing. If we can track that volume down may be an app or a patch would work for the volume control itself.

edit: the UpdateBassManagement I think it is only update to enable or disable only, not adjust :-s
edit2: it might have some function inside that allow adjust the slider, my fault

 

I was thinking something along the lines of using that callback event which triggers when the headphone is plugged in (that eventually updates the bass), and update the volume at the same time.

It relies on an enumeration (bunch of constant values) named MalcolmControlID, and I haven't figured out much about it. I misidentified the bass earlier (woes of RE):

THXBassEnable,
THXBassValue,
THXBassFreqValue

Figured out these are the right ones for bass, earlier one seemed to be missing the bass slider. I think the correct class in question is... THXTruStudioProPage. Rest of the info about volume control remains accurate.

 

It does, but as noted above... I was looking at the wrong page Much easier to search after dumping the code in Visual Studio.

The controls have a ValueChanged event handler which performs the change. So when you slide the control, it performs a callback that reaches ValueChanged, which sets volume/bass based on the current value of the slider

 

I think I have a working solution blueprinted in my mind:

The jack setup is triggered by a native win32 event (bunch of waithandles in the App class), which means no dice on monitoring it, since it only triggers when plugging in your headphone. SBX Pro Studio tab values are retrieved elsewhere, so it's a no-go either (no indication on headphone/speaker triggering).

Edit: (figured easier way out)
This is where it gets interesting... my idea is to inject code (based on ProductInfo.IsHeadsetProduct()) right before the update loop in MainWindow, so whenever there is a change, we get the current volume for the previous configuration from GetWindowsPlaybackVolume, and save it into an external file (think of it as a table of values).

Using that and SetWindowsPlaybackVolume... bingo! In theory, that is. I'll scribble some code and see how it goes... the condition to this working, is if it can trigger in the background when your headphone is disconnected.

An alternative way, is making a separate low-priority background app to query the status every few hundred milliseconds, and adjusting as-needed using those APIs. It will take more time to figure out how to initialize values correctly, but doesn't involve modifying the control panel in any way.

If anyone knows a better way to do it, do share

 

Nice one, it looks like you might be getting somewhere!!

 

@Xenow: you are my savier

Although I think code injecting might works better, but I'm not sure will it allow to run when binary code has been modified and unsigned?

Alternative way might solve the problems above. Just an idea, will it need to monitor bass adjust only and not running periodically? Because bass change when headphone plugin, so basically when bass change, it will trigger this background app to change the main volume.

 

Wow you guys really know these stuff. I will be studying computer science soon and I hope I can be like you guys

 

The main problem is when the headphone is taken out - it needs to be readjusted back to the normal speaker volume. I thought of doing it the way you described initially, but that makes it dependant on SBX control panel being open, and there's no guarantee the THX / SpeakerHeadphone pages are updated except when it's being actively displayed (I might be wrong on this, so someone correct me if I am). Either way, I prefer volume control to work even if the control panel is disabled, for obvious reasons

Vast hours of self-study and research brings you a long way (open-source, reverse engineering, stackoverflow.com, googling for solutions and prototyping experiments). It's different from the wonderful magic @Prema does however

 

I have been really busy at work and some project, driving me nut when plugin the headphone to try some relax and remember it still not fix yet
Did you find something new? If you want I can test it for you.

 

I've been busy with uni matters too, so couldn't work on a prototype as fast as I would like. Anyway, I drew up a rough one which can control the system volume (works for my AW15). I've only gotten around to doing the volume control side of things, but it's standalone from the control panel

Drop the exe inside this folder to test:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Creative\Sound Blaster Recon3Di\Sound Blaster Recon3Di Control Panel

Edit: (v0.03 update)
- fixed minor rounding issue
- synced with volume changes made through Windows
- re-targeted to .NET 4.0 client profile for compatibility
- fixed side-effect by changing from AnyCPU to x86

More complicated workaround needed to get the current speaker configuration... (MalcolmUtil.GetSpeakerConfig and friends).

 

Yeah, at least something show the progress. You just need to take your time, it can't be force to make it fast. Better late than never