A day for tech problems. On my day off.
Played some Elden Ring, all is well.
Go to watch some Youtube and for some reason the videos won't play, just get the spinny wheel of doom.
Then Firefox locks up when I try to close out or refresh the video, ruh roh.
Rebooting doesn't fix it.
I decide to reset Firefox (which wiped out more than I actually planned on.) All my extensions along with AdBlock are removed.
Reinstall AdBlock, go to play a Youtube video, it plays!.....but no sound.
Check all the normal Windows audio things.
Fire up Elden Ring to test if it's just Firefox having an issue. Nope. No sound in game either.
I go to play some MP3s on my computer....Windows media player throws an unspecified error on each one. Big yikes.
So now I start testing my speakers, headset...everything claims it's running normally except windows throws an error when it tries to play any sound tone from any device or source. I disable the audio driver in Device Manger and re-enable it....nothin.
Shit's getting real now. I'm about to go track down my motherboard audio drivers and uninstall and reinstall them when, on a whim, I try the Windows Audio troubleshooter. It manages to identify what I think was a Windows audio service and reset it. And voila, my sound is now back. Why multiple reboots didn't solve that problem, I don't know.
But now I discover that, after resetting Firefox and having to download AdBlock Plus again....it's now paid? It doesn't show up in the browser and doesn't actually provide AdBlocking. So I switch to Ublock Origin finally. And then I'm trying to order something off a website and the page keeps running into an error after a few seconds because apparently I changed some privacy setting in Firefox that I didn't use before.
Guh....and people wonder why I no longer go rushing to help them with tech problems. It just becomes a tangled goddamn mess sometimes.