TIP - Win 7 control panel - Show disabled devices

["Monique Semp" <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

<rant>
So I was in a Webinar today where there was all sorts of external noise because many attendees hadnât muted their phones. I wanted to be a good citizen and so not only did I mute my phone, but I wanted to mute my laptopâs internal mic. I didnât see the mute button right off, so I disabled the mic instead, thinking itâd be a simple matter to re-enable it...

... But... when I returned to the control panel to re-enable it, the mic wasnât listed anywhere! Not in the Audio panel, not in the Hardware Devices, nowhere. And the only relevant Google result I found made my heart sink: someone had posted to a support forum that âI disabled the internal mic, and that was a huge mistake. Can't figure out how to re-enable it, and neither could Lenovo support! Ack! We had to do a system restore.â

I surely didnât want to deal with that! So I looked and looked again, and then somehow ended up right-clicking on the icon for the speakers (which I hadnât messed with), and lo and behold â there was an option to âShow Disabled Devicesâ â Eureka!

I did that, the disabled mic appeared, and I right-click and re-enable it.

Yet another example of Windows trying to simplify things so much that they become unusable. Perhaps thereâd be some situation where youâd want to prevent users from enabling a system component, but surely thatâs a less usual use case than a person wanting to (easily) re-enable something that theyâve disabled.

</rant>
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