I have this extremely annoying problem. Recently got a new computer from Dell's Scratch and Dent area, and it came with Win7.

I soon discovered that the new OS likes to mess with my sounds. When a program in the background is playing a sound, for example a music player, and a program in the foreground (like the SC2 editor or something) plays a sound, the sound in the background will fade to about 20% of its previous volume for approximately six seconds, then return to normal. It does this with any program at all - if I'm playing music off of YouTube or iTunes or what have you, and anything else plays a sound, my music fades down so low that I can hardly hear it! It sucks.

It's worse when I have randomly interrupting sounds like Skype, which is set to play a sound when I'm being messaged and the window is minimized or 'grayed out'. Of course, I can get around it by muting every program besides whatever is currently playing music... I'd rather not have to, though.

Anyone got a solution? Anyone else run into this problem?

Try changing Control Panel -> Sounds -> Communications.

Try checking what sound drivers you have installed, if they're from microsoft, try uninstalling them and installing the 'proper' drivers for your sound card. I'm unfamiliar with Dells and pre-built computers so I'm not sure where you need to go to find out what sound chipset you have or what drivers you need etc. But there's a good chance that the 'correct' drivers, rather than the default microsoft ones, will fix this for you. Of course is it also possible that the drivers you have now are already the best ones, in which case there's nothing to be done from this angle (except fiddling with the settings, if any, of the drivers).

This sounds like a (ill thought-out) feature rather than a glitch. So yeah you'll have to find out where or how to deactivate that feature.

At least you now know why you shouldn't buy pre-built computers.

Tried that. Nothing in there helped a bit.


Yeah, I figured it would be a driver problem. Well, I'll check things out and see if anything works. Thanks.

Ask on a computer forum or in whoever-made-your-computer forum.

I've had win7 for a while and it hasn't done anything like that...
Is it maybe because Dell sucks?

uhm, control panel --> sound --> communications --> do nothing. If you say it didn't change, then I'd say try restarting computer.
Had a similar problem running L4D2 and teamspeak at the same time.