Go to http://www.realtek.com. Download the latest driver package they have posted for your sound hardware. The same thing happened to me about a month ago. System ran fine, shut it down to do some dust removal and when I turning everything back on, no sound. For some reason, Windows 7 disabled the sound. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver you already have won't work (don't ask me why). Running the Realtek install .exe on its new version of the driver brought everything back.

I did that last night a few times.
But, one more whack won't hurt.
Thanks.

I hate to keep asking but did you run something like Driver Sweeper prior to installing the new version?

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I don't buy computers, I build them!!

Go to http://www.realtek.com. Download the latest driver package they have posted for your sound hardware. The same thing happened to me about a month ago. System ran fine, shut it down to do some dust removal and when I turning everything back on, no sound. For some reason, Windows 7 disabled the sound. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver you already have won't work (don't ask me why). Running the Realtek install .exe on its new version of the driver brought everything back.

I did that last night a few times.
But, one more whack won't hurt.
Thanks.

I hate to keep asking but did you run something like Driver Sweeper prior to installing the new version?

No, I did not.
Might try that in the morning.
The ol' brain cells are pretty tapped out tonight.

Thank you again.

---

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Go to http://www.realtek.com. Download the latest driver package they have posted for your sound hardware. The same thing happened to me about a month ago. System ran fine, shut it down to do some dust removal and when I turning everything back on, no sound. For some reason, Windows 7 disabled the sound. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver you already have won't work (don't ask me why). Running the Realtek install .exe on its new version of the driver brought everything back.

I did that last night a few times.
But, one more whack won't hurt.
Thanks.

You probably done this one to but anyway .I have got confused sometime when I have changed the speakers around in the control panel for Real Teck and changed the connector Retasking and wondered umm the sound should be coming out why is it not then I realised I didn't have the right speakers turned on and the one's I thought where the right one's I had retasked .

Also right click on the windows speaker icon and check you made the play back devices are set to speakers as default play back , having the volume control option open and having the speakers checkbox checked won't work I have made this mistake also

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No, I did not.
Might try that in the morning.
The ol' brain cells are pretty tapped out tonight.

Thank you again.

Follow this link. It seems Microsoft has a workaround for the problem: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-pictures/sound-disappears-in-windows-7/f2812fec-f4d6-432b-b7ea-be0f6e304196?auth=1.Just make sure you have a copy of the current driver for your sound hardware. Seems we're not alone at losing sound.

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Thanks...
I finally got it sorted this morning. Deleted/disabled this and that and reloaded the SoundMax driver from scratch. Seems to have everything back on track.

Meow meow meow!

---

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Now that you got it working ok, set a manual restore so that if it occurs again, to save you all that hassle, just restore.

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Greetings,

Deja vu! This is the second thread I decided to read this morning that has a topic of interest for me as well.

My sound device is onboard VIA.

Here's the thing:
I pulled the box to clean out dust and the radiator for the cooling about a week or so ago. After plugging everything back in and starting the PC, my sound has been whacked. It works for some things and not for others. It works for some things now, but not later, but then later still it will. Go figure... :|

I have Avast anti-virus. It does the auto-update on the definitions. Pops up a little window in the bottom right corner, sounds a bell tone and a voice announces the update. Now, all I get is the window and the bell tone, but no sexy female voice announcement. I also have a weird humming if I have the physical volume control on the speakers set greater than 25%.

If memory serves, I believe nVidia has something to do with my sound. At least it used to.

Does this call for a driver swap-a-roo whatever thingy? ;)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Greetings,

Deja vu! This is the second thread I decided to read this morning that has a topic of interest for me as well.

My sound device is onboard VIA.

Here's the thing:
I pulled the box to clean out dust and the radiator for the cooling about a week or so ago. After plugging everything back in and starting the PC, my sound has been whacked. It works for some things and not for others. It works for some things now, but not later, but then later still it will. Go figure... :|

I have Avast anti-virus. It does the auto-update on the definitions. Pops up a little window in the bottom right corner, sounds a bell tone and a voice announces the update. Now, all I get is the window and the bell tone, but no sexy female voice announcement. I also have a weird humming if I have the physical volume control on the speakers set greater than 25%.

If memory serves, I believe nVidia has something to do with my sound. At least it used to.

Does this call for a driver swap-a-roo whatever thingy? ;)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

Here's a link to VIA drivers. http://www.via.com.tw/en/support/drivers.jsp. Make sure you have the new drivers before uninstalling anything. Uninstall the old VIA drivers and reinstall them from the drivers you downloaded from VIA for your particular chip set.

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Greetings,

Deja vu! This is the second thread I decided to read this morning that has a topic of interest for me as well.

My sound device is onboard VIA.

Here's the thing:
I pulled the box to clean out dust and the radiator for the cooling about a week or so ago. After plugging everything back in and starting the PC, my sound has been whacked. It works for some things and not for others. It works for some things now, but not later, but then later still it will. Go figure... :|

I have Avast anti-virus. It does the auto-update on the definitions. Pops up a little window in the bottom right corner, sounds a bell tone and a voice announces the update. Now, all I get is the window and the bell tone, but no sexy female voice announcement. I also have a weird humming if I have the physical volume control on the speakers set greater than 25%.

If memory serves, I believe nVidia has something to do with my sound. At least it used to.

Does this call for a driver swap-a-roo whatever thingy? ;)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

Here's a link to VIA drivers. http://www.via.com.tw/en/support/drivers.jsp. Make sure you have the new drivers before uninstalling anything. Uninstall the old VIA drivers and reinstall them from the drivers you downloaded from VIA for your particular chip set.

Greetings Bob,

I don't have a VIA chipset, I have a P55 Intel chipset. Anyway...

Ok, There may be a driver conflict happening here:
I have VIA High definition audio driver(s) at location 0 (Internal High Definition Audio Bus). Driver date: October 2012
I also have nVidia High definition audio driver(s) at locations 0 - 3 (Internal High Definition Audio Bus). Driver date: December 2012

I'm thinking this is not correct. Correct? ;) I should only have one driver (set of drivers), correct? Device manager is not showing any conflict; no yellow caution triangles and so forth. I remember doing a nVidia video driver update not long ago; about a week or so ago probably about when this problem started. The update also does audio.

The front end program for setting sound system settings is using the VIA driver(s) and not the nVidia. Is it safe to assume that I can go ahead and uninstall the nVidia drivers without a problem?

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I have a bunch of nVidia high def audio drivers loaded as well..
They are loaded any time I update the video drivers.
But if I am not mistaken they only come into play when watching video from the GPU which sends audio out along with the video over the HDMI port.

In any case, they did not seem to be involved with my problem, as I did not remove or reinstall the NV stuff. So you should be OK to leave them as is.

Check the specs for your mobo....it should somewhere tell you what audio chipset is being used, and that should point you to the correct drivers to install.
Or go to the manufacturer's website and check for downloads for your mobo. I would expect to see the most recent audio driver for the board available there.

If you have the original software/driver disc that came with your mobo, you could try reinstalling the audio software from that, also.

---

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I have a bunch of nVidia high def audio drivers loaded as well..
They are loaded any time I update the video drivers.
But if I am not mistaken they only come into play when watching video from the GPU which sends audio out along with the video over the HDMI port.

In any case, they did not seem to be involved with my problem, as I did not remove or reinstall the NV stuff. So you should be OK to leave them as is.

Check the specs for your mobo....it should somewhere tell you what audio chipset is being used, and that should point you to the correct drivers to install.
Or go to the manufacturer's website and check for downloads for your mobo. I would expect to see the most recent audio driver for the board available there.

If you have the original software/driver disc that came with your mobo, you could try reinstalling the audio software from that, also.

Greetings Mark,

Well, my MB is an Asus P7P55D-E Pro. I went to the Asus website and believe it or not, I have newer drivers than what they have for download. I use a utility called SlimDrivers which helps me keep my drivers up-to-date. All my drivers are up-to-date.

I won't worry about the nVidia drivers any more.

Perhaps there is something else wrong, perhaps hardware wise. Unless there is something else that could have gone wrong? If I completely lose my sound, I'll just install a new sound card.

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I went though a lot of messing around, but I think what worked for me was to uninstall the drivers, uninstall the device in device manager, unplug the speakers from the back of the computer, reboot, and then reinstall the drivers, which then asked me to plug the speakers back into the correct jack. This was using SoundMax, which are the drivers for the Analog Devices audio chipset on my mobo. And I could be mistaken, but I could swear it had me use a different jack than the one I remember having used all this time.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I don't have a VIA chipset, I have a P55 Intel chipset.

You were given a link to where you can get VIA drivers from, whether that be chipset, drive-controller, USB, Ethernet, audio or graphics drivers. It's all drop-down, you can choose.

But, the easiest way to get new drivers is go to the manufacturer of your motherboard and look up the motherboard there. There's usually driver links there, on the same page as the BIOS updates. (I see you went there already, while I was writing this post. Slowpoke me. ;-))

Look Rick, only you can try things out. You broke your own audio, there's nothing we can do to make it come back. For all I know, you knocked a jumper loose on the motherboard when removing what you removed. Perhaps that that disabled a certain option your audio does. Or a cable got loose. Or a micro break appeared in a soldered line. Or you knocked one of those small plugs loose that can go on two ways on the side of the motherboard, but work only one way. I hate those things, as the cables from the case almost never have plugs that are the correct size for these connectors. There's really nothing as annoying as tracking a bug that only happens at random.

And just because I got so sick of trying to figure out a) where the audio jacks are on my motherboards, and b) what order I should plug jacks into them, I went ahead and bought a couple of Soundblaster Audigy's a while back. Install drivers once, never look back.

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I had a problem with the Nvidia drivers wanting to install their sound drivers and overwriting the mobo ones. These days when installing Nvidia drivers I only do the video driver. Custom install -> deselect everything except the video driver. Tick the Clean install option. And that should leave whatever sound drivers your mobo uses behind.

Also windows update keeps offering to install the Nvidia sound drivers so don't let it.

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BOINC blog

I don't have a VIA chipset, I have a P55 Intel chipset.

You were given a link to where you can get VIA drivers from, whether that be chipset, drive-controller, USB, Ethernet, audio or graphics drivers. It's all drop-down, you can choose.

But, the easiest way to get new drivers is go to the manufacturer of your motherboard and look up the motherboard there. There's usually driver links there, on the same page as the BIOS updates. (I see you went there already, while I was writing this post. Slowpoke me. ;-))

Look Rick, only you can try things out. You broke your own audio, there's nothing we can do to make it come back. For all I know, you knocked a jumper loose on the motherboard when removing what you removed. Perhaps that that disabled a certain option your audio does. Or a cable got loose. Or a micro break appeared in a soldered line. Or you knocked one of those small plugs loose that can go on two ways on the side of the motherboard, but work only one way. I hate those things, as the cables from the case almost never have plugs that are the correct size for these connectors. There's really nothing as annoying as tracking a bug that only happens at random.

And just because I got so sick of trying to figure out a) where the audio jacks are on my motherboards, and b) what order I should plug jacks into them, I went ahead and bought a couple of Soundblaster Audigy's a while back. Install drivers once, never look back.

Greetings Jord,

Yep, already went to the Asus website. ;) Funny that my drivers are newer than what they have. I'm not sure where SlimDrivers gets the updated drivers from. But it tells me my drivers are all up-to-date.

The only mechanics involved in what I did was to remove the attached cables and the side panel from the case. I did stick an unused air can tube into the radiator fan to prevent it from over-revving. All I did was blow out the innards with an air can. Then reassembled and fired up the PC.

But... I believe this problem started before I blew out the case. I'm thinking it was when I did my nVidia update. I don't know. My memory seems to get worse and worse the older I get. :|

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I had a problem with the Nvidia drivers wanting to install their sound drivers and overwriting the mobo ones. These days when installing Nvidia drivers I only do the video driver. Custom install -> deselect everything except the video driver. Tick the Clean install option. And that should leave whatever sound drivers your mobo uses behind.

Also windows update keeps offering to install the Nvidia sound drivers so don't let it.

Greetings Mark,

Your sound is fine without the nVidia sound drivers? Perhaps I'll re-install without the sound drivers... :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I also have nVidia High definition audio driver(s) at locations 0 - 3 (Internal High Definition Audio Bus). Driver date: December 2012

This is the audio that's used for HDMI. If you're not using a HDMI cable between the videocard and your monitor/speakers, there's no use to add drivers for it.
Meaning that when you use either the DVI or the VGA outlet on your GT430, that any audio played (games, Winamp, even a CD in the Blu-Ray player) will play through the VIA audio chip, and the plug/cables from the onboard audio to the speakers.

I always get the choice to install the HDMI audio drivers on my HD6850 as well. Never do it as I use the DVI->VGA outlet. Plus my monitor doesn't have speakers, so even if I would be able to plug a HDMI cable into it, I'd still need something external for the speakers.

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I also have nVidia High definition audio driver(s) at locations 0 - 3 (Internal High Definition Audio Bus). Driver date: December 2012

This is the audio that's used for HDMI. If you're not using a HDMI cable between the videocard and your monitor/speakers, there's no use to add drivers for it.
Meaning that when you use either the DVI or the VGA outlet on your GT430, that any audio played (games, Winamp, even a CD in the Blu-Ray player) will play through the VIA audio chip, and the plug/cables from the onboard audio to the speakers.

I always get the choice to install the HDMI audio drivers on my HD6850 as well. Never do it as I use the DVI->VGA outlet. Plus my monitor doesn't have speakers, so even if I would be able to plug a HDMI cable into it, I'd still need something external for the speakers.

Greetings Jord,

Ok, now this really sux the BIG one!

After reading you post below, I decided to uninstall the nVidia drivers. I used Control Panel to do so. Cool, the drivers were uninstalled and I needed to re-boot. I shut down BOINC and the browser and re-booted. Those nVidia drivers got re-installed upon re-boot!

Here's something else now to have to figure out... :(

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Here's something else now to have to figure out... :(

Yeah, that's the fun of Windows. ;-)
I think they're part of the Nvidia drivers installer, and cannot be uninstalled on their own, but need to be unchecked in the Nvidia drivers installer package. Wouldn't be the first time it's something like that.

But, you can try to disable the hardware that the drivers use, from device manager, and then uninstall those drivers. Or just try to disable the hardware first, see if that fixes the sound (or midi) problem.

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Here's something else now to have to figure out... :(

Yeah, that's the fun of Windows. ;-)
I think they're part of the Nvidia drivers installer, and cannot be uninstalled on their own, but need to be unchecked in the Nvidia drivers installer package. Wouldn't be the first time it's something like that.

But, you can try to disable the hardware that the drivers use, from device manager, and then uninstall those drivers. Or just try to disable the hardware first, see if that fixes the sound (or midi) problem.

Greetings Jord,

Well, I went to nVidia's website and downloaded the latest, greatest driver version for my card. I did the custom install deselecting the audio drivers and selecting the 'Clean install' option. Installation went well enough. I looked and the previous nVidia drivers are still there. The version numbers and dates are the same as before the new installation.

They no longer show up in the Windows uninstall utility so I will attempt to uninstall by hand. I'll keep you posted... :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath