Last Friday I was out at The Master Gunner with several people from a particular technical mailing list. It’s not often I get drunk, and it’s very very rare for me to get a hangover. I managed both on this occasion.
Last week I was nicely surprised by Dell’s desktop support. The chap I ended up speaking to was helpful, knowledgeable and came back with timely and relevant information about the problem I was experiencing. It turns out that Windows XP SP3 is missing a particular hotfix that prevents machines with the Realtek ACL888 HD audio chipset from installing the driver. Trying to manually install this hotfix results in an error indicating that the hotfix should already be installed. Luckily, there’s a slightly modified version of the hotfix available that will install on SP3 allowing the Realtek driver to install correctly.