The title says it all. The sound on my computer has always been wonky but lately it doesn’t work at all. It’s a Toshiba laptop running Vista.
Things I have tried to make the sound work again:
updating drivers.
reinstalling drivers.
disabling and then enabling the drivers.
According to my computer, everything is working fine. Is my sound card just busted?
I’ll assume built in sound. Check that it’s enabled in the BIOS.
I have avoided becoming too familiar with Vista because I loathe it; but in your control panel there should be a listing for “sounds and audio devices.” Double-click it; on the “audio” tab, make sure that the soundcard you have is listed as the default device under “sound playback.” On the “hardware” tab, again check to make sure the proper devices are listed in each instance, & make sure none are listed as disabled, or having a problem.
When you have (virtually) uninstalled your sound device from the device manager (or whatever vista has pointlessly renamed it), and rebooted, what happens? Does your OS autodetect the device?
I have had random things effectively disable, override or remove my sound device to the point where I have had to reinstall from scratch many times. Now, I just keep the motherboard sound drivers (different from the separate sound card’s drivers, if you have one) in a zipfile because it can be a real pain trying to get them from the motherboard manufacturer. It might not be a bad idea to download the latest release of the drivers from the OEM, just in case your local copy is wonky.
Is it a gateway?
(bolding mine)
:smack:
Toshibas sometimes serve as gateway devices, though. Today, it’s a Toshiba, tomorrow a Sony VAIO, next week, it might be a MacBook. 
Did you do anything recently which would have altered the configuration? Installed any games or hardware? Fooled around with the control panel for any reason? Jostled the machine, got it hot or cold or wet?
If it just stopped working out of the blue after being weird for a while sound like the most likely thing is that the onboard sound simply got fried. Not much you can do about that with a laptop.
It’s worth fighting with the drivers just to be sure. Uninstalling and reinstalling is a hassle, and can be finicky and it doesn’t always work the first time in my experience. Before scrapping the machine entirely you might want to try reinstalling the OS completely from the ground up, especially if you still have the factory disks, it’s often a wise move for most users anyways depending on how fastidious they are with their PC on an ongoing basis.
I’ve experienced the same or similar audio issues with my Dell laptop running Vista. What I had to do was work with the appropriate control panel to select which output I wanted to use: Headphone Jack 1, Headphone Jack 2, Both, HDMI out, or the built-in speakers. Another route may be double-clicking the volume slider in the task tray, then selecting “Properties”, then exploring all the tabs that come up.
I have the same issue with one of my XP desktops with an Intel mobo that includes a Realtek HD Audio system onboard. The above steps worked there, too.
I did an update on my computer and it lost the soundcard for a bit when I upgraged to SP2. Try this.
Has your issue been resolved valleyofthedolls? What was the problem?
If it has not yet been fixed, are you using AC97 / Intel / Realtek sound technology?