I put the following guidelines together to help ensure your listening pleasure when attending an event in our online conference room.                                                  --P. J.

Speaker and Volume Check

BEFORE an event:

In order to be able to fully participate in events in our online conference room, you will want to be able to hear through your computer's speakers.  Here are some easy steps to check them.

Basics:  Laptops come already equipped with internal speakers, but desktops have detachable, external speakers.  If your desktop didn't come with speakers when you purchased it, you can get them rather inexpen-sively at places like Office Depot, Radio Shack, etc.

If you already have external speakers, be sure they are plugged in, and correctly plugged into the proper portals.  You may need to refer to your computer's manual for this.

Check 1.  Do this simple check first by watching a short portion of this demo video of our conference room.  If you can hear it, you're all set.  (It may take the video a few minutes to load if you're on a dial-up connection.)

Check 2.  If you cannot hear the above video, the next step is to check your volume settings.  Look in the task bar along the very bottom of your computer's screen for the volume icon near the clock.  It looks like this:

LEFT click on the volume icon and if the mute box is checked, UNCHECK it, then move the slider up about half way or more.  That usually takes care of the vast majority of sound problems.

If there is no volume icon in the task tray, go to Start  Control Panel  Sounds and Audio Devices.  When you DOUBLE CLICK on Sounds and Audio Devices a gray box will appear that looks something like the one below.  Move the slider about half way or more towards high, and make sure the mute box is UNCHECKED.

You might also want to check the box that puts a volume icon in your task tray for easy access should you need to readjust your volume later.

Check 3.  If you still have no sound, it's beyond the scope of these simple checks, but you can go here for more detailed instructions.  HOWEVER...

As a general rule, it helps greatly if you...

Have a CLEAN computer:

1.  Error check your disk by going to Start  My Computer  RIGHT click on Local Disk C  Properties  Tools  Error Checking (to automatically fix errors)

2.  Defragment your disk by going to Start  My Computer  RIGHT click on Local Disk C  Properties  Tools  Defragment Now.

Doing both of the above routinely every few weeks will help your computer run amazingly better, even faster.

Error checking takes just a few minutes and requires rebooting, while defragmenting can take anywhere from ten minutes to several hours, depending on how long it's been since you've done it.

Quick fixes DURING an event:

The sound quality in our online conference room is exceptionally good even with a very slow dial-up connection, but occasionally, depending on what the Internet is doing at the time, you may experience a slight choppiness, lag time, or even a small echo in the dialog.

This can usually be helped by:

1.  Logging out of the conference room, and logging back in.

2.  Deleting your temporary files and history.  Do this by going to the very top of your browser window and click on Tools  Internet Options  Delete Temporary Files, then Delete History.  This can take several minutes, and even though it makes no logical sense as to why it works, it just often does.

3.  Close all other browser windows and have only the conference room open on your computer screen.

4.  If you use Norton or McAfee's anti-virus program, you may need to temporarily disable it while attending a conference event, since it can sometimes interfere with our software.  Do this by RIGHT clicking on your anti-virus icon in the system tray (gray or blue bar at the very bottom on your monitor's screen) near the clock.

If, by some rare chance, all the above fails and you still don't have good sound quality, uninstall the conference room and reinstall it.  (It's called "Audio/Video Conference" and can be found by going to Start  All Programs, or Start  Control Panel  Add/Remove.)

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