I’ve always thought the sound volume on my Acer TravelMate 5530G has been very low even if I turned everything up to 100%. It has been ok and only a little bit annoying, but a few days ago we moved to another house for a month (we’re currently travelling in Thailand) with no TV so now the family have to watch movies on the laptop…

Anyway, I found the solution thanks to this post by brielle128 at Notebookreview.com. It seems to be related to Realtek drivers on Windows Vista.

The solution:
- Have song playing so you can here the difference.
- Right click on the speaker icon in the task bar and select Playback Devices (or find it in the Windows Control Panel) The Sound dialog box opens up.
- From the Playback tab select the Playback device being used, in my case Speakers Realtek High Definition Audio (marked with a green checkbox) and click the Properties button. A new dialog box – Speaker Properties – opens up.
- On the Enhancements tab make sure Disable All Sound Effects and Immediate Mode are both unchecked. Check Loudness Equalization (on my setup all other unchecked) and hit Apply.
- Bingo! Sound volume is up a lot, maybe 50%!

I actually think my wife’s Acer Aspire One (also Realtek Sound card) running Windows XP has the same problem but unfortunately I could not find any similar settings there.

Three easy steps to copy the structure of a MySQL database, i.e. the table definitions but no rows/records/data:

1. Create the new database, either from MySQL Query Browser (part of MySQL GUI Tools) or MySQL Command Line:

CREATE DATABASE `new_database_name`;

2. Copy the database structure using the mysqldump command from a dos command prompt. Note: If MySQL is not in your path you will have to navigate to the MySQL bin directory, on my machine this is in C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin.

mysqldump -d -u root -p -v original_database_name > c:\temp\dbstruct.sql

3. Restore the copied database structure to your new database from the same dos command prompt as in step 2.

mysql.exe -uroot -p new_database_name < c:\temp\dbstruct.sql

Done!

Some notes:
- I used MySQL Server 5.1 when testing this but should work also with earlier versions. If you can or cannot get it to work with another version please add a comment.
- In this example I used root as user but any user with read and create permissions would work.

[Edit: Use mysqldump -R parameter to backup stored procedures and functions, above example would be:
mysqldump -d -u root -p -v -R original_database_name > c:\temp\dbstruct.sql
Link to mysqldump in MySQL Reference Manual ]