The sound on my PC quit suddenly. I checked the speakers on another system, and they’re OK. A guy a a computer store said that most problems of this sort are software rather than hardware. I can’t seem to find where to reinstall the sound drivers.
Can anyone help me? I’m running Windows XP version 5.1
It’s probably not your sound card drivers but to be sure, go into device manager (probably control panel -> device manager) and look for sound controllers. If there are no special marks next to any of the devices there, you’re probably ok unless you actually uninstalled the drivers at some point.
Next right click on the speaker icon in the system tray. if there are 2, pick the plain black and white one. Select playback devices.
If you can’t find the icon, go to control panel -> sound and select the playback tab.
You probably have more than one device. Try playing something and look at the bars next to each device. The one that is active should show the bars pulsing with whatever is playing. Make that the default device.
As an added precaution, you can rt click that device, go to properties and then to the advanced tab. Unclick the option that says something like ‘allow apps to take exclusive control.’
This how it’s set up in Win 7 but XP shouldn’t be too different.
I went to control panel-> sounds, speech, audio devices and it tells me “No audio devices”.
I know I haven’t removed any hardware, but still it’s not detecting anything. n What next?
Hmmm. That “speech” option isn’t familiar and it’s been too long since I’ve used XP to be able to help with that.
There’s no section for playback devices then? Or any other category that looks like it might be promising?
What you can also try, and I’m not sure this works under XP, is to rt click the computer icon at the top of the device tree in device manager. There should be an option to scan for hardware changes or something of that nature.
Starting to look like failed hardware, I’d say. Did this just work one day and not the next? Or did it start after some patch or update?
Did you click on the “Audio” tab at the top of the Sounds and Audio Devices box? No drop-down list of devices to choose from?
What make (HP, Dell etc.) & model of PC do you have? Find the exact model (it should be written on the case) and then go to the manufacturer’s website, click on **Support **(or Tech Support or something similar), put the model number into the search box, and it should take you to a list of software drivers specific to your PC model & OS. Find the audio driver compatible with Windows XP and download & install it. May have to reboot after.
You can also just try running Windows Update, it may detect the audio driver failure and re-install it for you.
You sound code may have failed, is it a laptop or desktop?