It's 2025 and my PC still has no idea what audio devices are connected to it

A curly-haired boy yelling while wearing a pair of headphones. — (Image credit: Getty Images)

I join three standup meetings per week. On paper, these video calls are where we check in, discuss what we're working on, and assign stories for the immediate future. In practice, it's a thrice-weekly Sisyphean gauntlet for my audio configuration, during which I'll frequently discover that Windows has lost track of what input and output devices are plugged into it despite the fact that nothing has changed since the last meeting.

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My microphone will be connected. Its little light will be lit, which you might think would serve as a helpful indicator that I'm all good to speak, friend. Windows often disagrees. The PC might be feeding it power, but it often won't accept that the microphone exists until I've unplugged it, plugged it back in, and waited the 12 tense seconds while my computer deliberates whether my peekaboo performance was adequate enough to return the mic to my list of sound devices.

Meanwhile, my coworkers will have gently informed me that they've been hearing me through my webcam. Sure, I'd already disabled that specific input in each of the countless misbegotten sound settings and device management menus that seem to multiply with every additional system update, but Windows knows better. Windows always knows better.

That's why my headphones will inevitably require me to manually switch output devices, no matter how many times I set them as the default. As we all know, everything sounds best when it's exclusively being played through your right monitor. I should just stop trying to fight it.

Microsoft's diligent mangling of its own menu conventions has turned an annoyance into a Lovecraftian cognitohazard.

These frustrations have persisted across years of hotswaps, hardware changes, PC builds, and Windows version updates. Sometimes things seem to stabilize just long enough for me to form a brief, foolish hope that Microsoft has finally figured out how to let audio devices be normal—before that glimpse of utopia collapses.

The specifics have varied, but I've been continually punished since that day in my youth when I decided, in my arrogance, that I could do anything other than plug a pair of crappy desktop speakers into a 3.5mm jack.

What's particularly maddening about it is that Microsoft's diligent mangling of its own menu conventions has turned an annoyance into a Lovecraftian cognitohazard. Settings that used to be tucked into a single control panel directory have been disarticulated and scattered under compounding layers of UI revision; they're usually still there, somewhere, but the specific sequence of menu selections to find them have probably changed four times in as many years and could be gone entirely next month.

I don't know if this will ever improve. I don't know if it can. I would cry for help, but I can't be sure my mic would pick it up.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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