Laptop audio gone.

[Kharn]

Laptop audio gone.

Ok I have on my bench a Dell Inspiron 9400 that the audio has stopped working. I have tried the following: New drivers, Standard drivers, BIOS flash, headphones in the jack but still no luck.

Specks:
Dell Inspiron 9400
Vista Home Premium. (32bit)
1gb of ram
Core 2 T5500 (1.67Ghz)


Any ideas? I rely need to get this out asap.

 

[atomic tofu]

it stopped working...but in the device manager, all seems well? no exclamations?

you didn't happen to hit the laptop mute key did you? Also was this after some recent software installation?

 

[Jorsoft]

Do you know when exactly it stopped working? Just instantly one day or after a certain event, or was it fading in and out. Anything like that?

 

[Kharn]

Yep all drivers are accounted for, an this is the first time I have seen this laptop it's not mine it was a walk in to the shop.

I called the guy an he said it was all of a sudden woke up one day an the sound was gone this is kind of a rush job this guy uses this for his sets (he is some kind of club DJ). All sound has gone head phones don't work when plugged in, odd thing is when I plugged a microphone in I was able to record some sound an burn it to CD an then play it on another computer.

 

[Jorsoft]

It's possible some of his mixing/recording software is interfering or messing things up. I'd create another account without any software installed on it and see how the sound works there.

Have you checked the "Sounds and AUdio Devices" section in Control panel and made sure that the correct device is selected for Sound Playback? Simple thing but it can get messed up too.

 

[Kharn]

Yea I have checked that, I uninstalled all his audio software (one of the first things I did) an made sure that all other drivers for audio devices where disabled. I am about ready to call it a hardware fault it was all of a sudden an not a gradual decrease in the sound.

 

[Lady_Jade]

I still feel that it could be a software issue. Try updating its drivers or downloading drivers from the dell website and see if that works.

 

[Jorsoft]

As I believe he's said, all drivers had been updated and accounted for. I'm thinking hardware fault now, too, Chris. I'm at a loss for anything else. I can't think of any other drivers/software solutions so that's got to be it. The only other thing I can think to try is just doing a total wipe and reinstalling windows from scratch and seeing if that fixes anything, then you'll know for sure. Other than that I'm out of ideas for troubleshooting.

 

[Kharn]

Yea I will give it a ghost an wipe tomorrow morning, if there still is no sound it will be confirmed as a hardware fault.

 

[KurrentEweser]

You can test to see if the sound driver is working by playing an mp3 and watching the level meter in the volume control tray icon.

It could be the headphone jack is bad. The speaker signals pass through the headphone jack. A faulty connection can cause the speakers not to work as well as the headphones. A worse case scenario, an ungrounded audio device plugged into the headphone jack could have wiped out the audio chip.