Guides
Fix it guides
When a test says something is wrong, these explain what to do next. Written in the order the causes actually turn out to be, not alphabetically.
Ranked by what it actually turns out to be. Bluetooth headsets have their own trap.
Your iPhone may have taken over the input. That one catches almost everyone.
One hidden setting kills the mic completely. Check that before anything else.
Check the balance slider first. It drifts, and one setting silences a whole side.
Streaming but black. Often the IR camera, not the one you think.
If the green light is on, the camera works and something else is wrong.
Measure it, clean it properly, and know when cleaning is only buying time.
Some Xbox controllers have no Bluetooth. There is a way to tell by looking.
The pattern of dead keys tells you the cause. Read it before opening anything.
Three accessibility settings cause most of this. Each one has a different symptom.
Usually your monitor stole the audio output. Here is how to tell.
Often the plug type or lint in the socket, not the headphones.
Usually your monitor took the output. Option click the volume icon to check.
Usually the cable cannot carry it. The bandwidth maths settles it in a minute.
Open Task Manager first. Whether it flickers too tells you the cause.
One keyboard shortcut restarts the graphics driver and fixes a good share of these.
Ghost touches usually mean the charger. Dead zones mean something else.
Test before you fix
Every guide starts by narrowing down what is actually broken, because most time lost to a hardware problem is spent fixing the wrong thing. The tests take under a minute and tell you whether the fault is the device, the software, or a setting.