I bought a new monitor and am replacing my 5.1 speaker set with speakers built into the monitor – basically I’m reducing clutter on my desk and am going to use headphones when I want quality audio from the computer. Having a baby changes your priorities

The problem was, when I got everything wired up, I had no audio coming from the computer. Ultimately this boiled down to a driver issue that’s related to the fact that when you’re using HDMI, your video card is responsible for delivering the audio to your output device. I had to update my realtek audio drivers, disable all devices, then restart the machine and reconfigure, before I could get audio out. I found this forum thread helpful, as well as this image illustrating the three places you need to make changes to your system configuration in order to get audio out.

While this is a driver issue ultimately I blame Microsoft for this – it’s hard to imagine making something as simple as ‘I want sound from my computer’ more complex.

Posting this in case it’s helpful to others.

I bought a new monitor and connected it to my video card via HDMI. The video output was shrunken, with ~1″ black borders all around the screen. At first I thought the monitor was defective but I tested using a DVI cable and the display was fine. Much googling later, I figured out it’s an issue with ATI/AMD’s catalyst control center. Basically you have to set overscan to 0% in the catalyst control center to rid yourself of this issue, something that’s not at all intuitive – even finding where to change that setting is a chore. This post on aoclarkejr.com was super helpful and has pictures of each step you need to take. I found that via this forum thread. Posting this just in case it helps others solve this issue.