Windows 7 and Bose Companion 5 speaker system losing sound intermittently.

I've spent an entire day working with an HP expert in the field after upgrading from Vista Home Premium to Win-7 Pro. Although Vista-64 was a disaster from day-1, the Bose DID work like a charm. Drivers, power settings as listed by "Lightnin Sam" above, USB configuration........you name it. We've tried it. The Bose flat-out won't work on Win-7 Pro...for more than 5 seconds with complete clarity. It seemed like we were gaining progress. When the system HP Pavilion (m9515y) has been cold-started after power-cycling the Bose Companion 5 speakers, the sound is great at the point of the the default Windows startup wav file being played. A little degradation when logging on, if I do so very quickly. But the sound deteriorates rapidly the longer the system runs, until it's so distorted that it just quits........in less than 30 seconds. The Bose is on a powered USB bus all by itself but draws 0ma.......expected. The system was full-up with tuner and other PCI options at the time of purchase, hence no room to expand. I tried different internal USB powered hubs with very minimal or no change.

I still have my Vista OS disk physically in the PC so I can rapidly switch between the Win-7 OS disk and the Vista OS disk. I can take a nap while Vista boots. It  takes FOREVER!! Most likely I could nap while it shuts down as well.....UGH. Win-7 is up in something around a minute which made attempts to fix in the marathon session with HP a much easier task.

Since I have sound at the start, and the sound rapidly degrades and quits on a consistent basis, it almost leads me to believe something with memory management may be part of the equation. Although Win-7 is up, SOMETHING is happening within the OS to cause the rapid degradation, and entire loss of the sound. Unfortunately, we don't have the "tools of the trade" to drill down to the bit level to see what's happening in real time.

What I would do to have a VMS-based system again. VMS HAS the tools to troubleshoot problems like this! And more than likely, it would run 365 days/year without having to reboot. That's a REAL operating system. Those of you with many years of experience know what I'm talking about. But as time evolved, many of the expert VMS OS design engineers got sucked up into Microsoft. but evidently weren't permitted to use their experience to make Windows a more solid OS. That's a real shame. But, to all you ex VMS OS and software designers, my hat's off to you for the years you did spend with VMS. It's still by far the best OS on the market. And has been since 1978 with version 1.0. VMS is still running at V8.3 after all of these years. Each new release was well tested before being shipped out. Not like today where something that resembles an OS gets shoved out the door only to have literally hundreds of bugs from day-1, many of which NEVER get fixed.  Need I say Windows Millennium and Vista????? Upgrading VMS was, and still is simple and straight-forward. The majority of the time, only a firmware upgrade was required to get the hardware up to the level for the OS upgrade. Sure, new hardware platforms came out on a regular basis. But they were improvements over what was learned from previous platforms and not a totally new architecture. VAX's to Alpha's....end of story.  Software bugs get addressed and fixed in a timely manner, and are well DOCUMENTED. And it's still as solid, reliable, and secure as ever. But the market wants "cheap", and cheap is what we're stuck with. Damn shame.... The answers today are to throw more RAM and hard drive space to fix problems. That may keep software costs down. But it doesn't FIX the problems. VMS, even 10 years ago would run efficiently on 1GB RAM, and a 1GB hard drive. Today, 1 GB of RAM and a 9GB hard drive is still adequate on an Alpha CPU. What's wrong with this picture??????? Memory was, and still is managed efficiently. Today, Windows OS memory is not managed well, if at all. Memory "leaks" all over causing reboots to clear. I have a full-up configuration of 8GB of RAM on this Win-7 based platform, and yet have an issue with the Bose that's been hanging around since 2009???? And, oh by the way, the Windows 7 Upgrade Adviser identified the Bose speakers as a Generic USB Audio Device..........COMPATIBLE! Now, backing into the specific hardware by NAME, all the Bose devices listed by Microsoft are categorized as "No information", therefore not supported. How convenient!!!

I could take the approach of putting all my music files on a separate XP-based platform. However, that doesn't solve the purpose of my PC with tuner, HDMI monitor, HD TV, movies...WITH sound. I'm dead in the water in that respect. My Bose Companion 5 speaker system cost more than what I paid for the PC! I'm not about ready to just toss the speakers because of a driver issue. That's what the software developers are getting paid for!!! Let's get on it!!!! And now Windows-8? I don't even want to think about it. Get Win-7 working!!!

Next step for me is an Apple. I'm tired of throwing money at Microsoft for their incompetency!

Try getting a cheap USB 2.0 PCi card (use only speaker on of  the slots and leave the rest empty), it worked flawless for me. It's been at least a year now, no problem here.

Right.. that's what I said my last option is, besides upgrading to a new, as-of-yet-not-released operating system.  I hope I don't have to do that, but I will, if necessary.

It's been about a half an hour now, and sound is still going strong... do I dare hope...?

Try getting a cheap USB 2.0 PCi card (use only speaker on of  the slots and leave the rest empty), it worked flawless for me. It's been at least a year now, no problem here.

I have Companion 5, and have had my sound gradually begin cutting out after a few weeks, then a few days, and until recently, a few seconds of playing.  

I would unplug/replug the USB cable from my USB hub to get the sound started--but like I said, it had degenerated to just a few seconds of sound.  There is a Microsoft KB here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2484031 but of course, they got rid of the hotfix and won't let you download it.

I read this entire forum thread, looking for answers.  I NEED my music to work!

I did all the Power Plan fixes, the Sound Device properties, etc... to no avail.  Two options are on the table for me now: I just unplugged the subwoofer and let it rest for 10 seconds before plugging it back in again, and sound is now playing, for about 5 minutes.  That is an AMAZING improvement over two seconds.  The second option is to buy a PCI-E USB card--and that, unfortunately, appears to be my last option... that is, until Windows 8 comes out. :(

I hope Microsoft will genuinely pay attention to the fact this thread has been constantly updated with complaints for the past three years.