Major Technical Difficulties- need help

[Desdemonte]

I am having some issues trying to get my laptop back up and running DDO. The hardrive was in the process of failing so I had it replaced. They put one in under warranty (I assume it's the same model or close to it) and reinstalled Vista 64bit on it. The only difference now from how things were set up before is where I installed DDO. With all the lag that has been going on still, I installed it to a drive separate from my Windows drive. Since the store put the OS back on, I was not able to partition my C: drive. So I installed the game onto an external hard drive- I had heard someone did this and was able to run the game just fine.

I am having major frustrations over what seem to me should be the simplist of things.

First of all, I cannot get my headset to work. It is one of the analog Sennheiser ones that has a jack for mic and a jack for phones. I plug them into the front of my laptop. When I bought them way back when I 1st started playing this game, as far as I can remember I just plugged them in and the sound came through and when I went into DDO my mic automatically worked. Now I plug them in and my sound is still coming through my laptop speakers (in-game and in Windows/desktop) and my mic is not working at all. This is regardless of which speaker option I select in DDO Audio control panel or in Windows Sound control panel. I went into the Windows Control panel and opened up the Sound panel, and I can see my headphones there when I plug them in and when I test the sound on them I can hear the test sounds left and right loud and clear, so I know the jack is working. But I cannot select them to be used- even if I put them as the Default option, all my other sounds are still coming through the laptop speakers. Then mic is not even picking up- I used the test in the Windows Sound Recognition panel for mic/headset set-up and it's not picking anything up. Neither is the mic test in DDO, regardless which mic input option I select there.

Second is my mouse. It's a Logitech G5 and again it was working totally as desired prior to hard drive replacement. It has the normal left and right click and the wheel click, but also a left and right wheel scroll as well as 2 side buttons where then thumb sits. I used to have my wheel click as select nearest target and the left scroll as previous and right scroll as next targets. I haven't been able to test if this is working as it should because I haven't been able to get into a quest yet. The front side button was always my Use button. It is definitely *not* working. I mapped it to the "U" key in the software, it causes autorun to turn on. For some reason in the DDO keymapping the autorun function has a secondary key as "button 4" listed along with the normal key (G I think???). There is no button 2 or 3 anywhere in the keymap (I'm using the DDO default one) but there's a button 4 and it seems to think it's this button on the side of my mouse...... If this button is not working, I can only assume my F button for Push to talk and my targetting maps are not working either.

The last thing that is going on is something I've always noticed since I started playing a year ago- when I change something in the DDO keymap, it is never saved when I log out of DDO and reverts to the default when I log back in. This is driving me up the wall. Nobody has ever been able to explain why this is happening or how to stop it. So not only is my "use" button on my mouse not working, it keeps revertting back to autorun... a *huge* PITA.... Also, I used to have my vent PTT button as the = key, and mapped it to my G13 gamepad. For some reason it initially caused me to select the next hotbar, so I went into the DDO key map hit clear and set "select next hotbar" to something else. It stayed as it was. This time though, it keeps revertting so I had to remap it to the . button

So if anybody has any insight as to how I can fix these issues, I'd be forever grateful.

the weird thing is that when I took the laptop to the store for repairs and installed everything onto my desktop (which has XP on it), I was able to get everything working there how I wanted it (like it was originally on my laptop) with just the minor differences you see between something installed on a Vista machine and on an XP one. Now I am having these ridiculous issues with my laptop which has the same OS on it as it used to....

[RandolphIV]

Start by updating all of your drivers, sound, video, etc.... you may even need to update your motherboard's bus drivers and/or bios.

[Impaqt]

Sounds like they reinstalled the OS, but none of your drivers.....

Geek Squad?

Post our DXDiag. I'm sure we will see LOTS of default Windows drivers in place.

GO to the laptop manufacturers website and download all the driver packages. Probobly need a driver from Logitech as well for the G5.

[Desdemonte]

I figured as much as this- never assume anything lol

they reinstalled only the basic Vista 64bit. So I spent all day downloading and installing SP1, SP2 and about 50 other updates for windows alone.

I couldn't figure out what the heck was up with my sound, and in the device manager it was listed as a High Definition Sound device, and that the driver was up to date, and was published by Microsoft. this just didn't seem right to me. i seemed to remember that this has realtek sound device (although I cant find it listed *anywhere* as such) so I went to realtek and downloaded their codecs- solved the sound issue.

I also went to Logitech and downloaded the most recent software for the G13 and G5. The G13 seems to be working properly now but the G5 is a nightmare....

First of all when I drag an item around (say from the bank to my pack), it lags way behind the mouse pointer- very distracting. I was able to fix it up a bit in the mouse software but it's still quite noticeable. I downloaded and installed the most recent video driver and it made no difference- seems that one was already up to date....

More perplexing though is my inability to map my mouse buttons. DDO does not recognize them. If I go into the DDO keymap screen, it sees the wheel button as "button 2", front side as "button 4" and rear side as "button 3". It won't recognize left or right scroll.

I mapped my front side in the mouse software to U and when I push it, it causes autorun. If I then look in the ddo keymap, autorun has R and Button 4 listed. If i clear it and just put R, then nothing happens when I push front side. then when i quit ddo and relog, the keymap has changed back to R and Button 4 for autorun! I even tried making the autorun ddo key as R and ; to remove the mouse from the equation altogether. Nope- when i push the front side button, autorun starts!!! the ddo keymap doesn't even have the button listed there!

I have the rear side button mapped in the mouse software to F. When I push it, nothing happens when in party. If i map f to a button on my gamepad it works fine.

At one point in my messing around, I cleared autorun in the ddo keymap and started clicking mouse buttons to see what ddo was recognizing them as. When I pressed the wheel button, left and right scroll, the ddo map actually accepted the keys I had input into the mouse software (select closest, previous and next target). it would still only see front side as "button 4" and rear side as "button 3" though. I thought I was onto something- at least DDO was recognizing that the mouse buttons were mapped..... well, that was short lived because when I did something else, ddo stopped recognizing those 3 button pushes and i can find no way to replicate it.

Another thing i tried was mapping the 2 side buttons in the generic "for windows use" mouse software to the buttons I would use in DDO. And even though I had "keep button map options" unchecked for game mode, they suddenly worked in-game as I had been trying to set them up. I wanted to see if it would stick so i quit and relogged... nope front side was back to autorun and rear side was unresponsive. To top it all off, the game configurations in the mouse software had been deleted for those 2 buttons!

So it seems like I have a mouse software issue as well as a DDO issue- the game doesn't want to see my mouse, and it doesn't want to keep keymap changes I put in (i.e clearing "button 4" form autorun).

Hopefully somebody who uses a G5 and is familiar with the software will have some input for me. I'm out of ideas...

[jamon2005]

First off Microsoft is not the developer of our drivers. Windows will just choose a temp basic driver to get it up in working but not to its full potential. So go to your manufacturer's website and download all the drivers you need. Then get your video card drivers (this is the most important driver for gaming and needs to always be up-to-date other wise you will start having problems with updates and patches on games). You almost always have to get them from the card's manufacturer's website except in rare cases like toshiba which updates the drivers for their 3rd party chipsets themselves. That should fix your problem.