Lost sound on PC

1. If you go to:

• control panel, - system - Hardware -
• Depending on your operating system; either find the sound card and search for updated driver, or let the hardware wizard try to repair it.

2. Reinstall the sound card software. If you don't have it, you should be able to find the drivers on the internet.

And if you are running Windows XP and the advice Techno gave you does NOT work, then do a SYSTEM RESTORE to an earlier date, almost guaranteed it will work.

Don't be deleting programs with windows explorer... always go to CONTROL PANEL then ADD-REMOVE PROGRAMS and use that to delete installed programs.

Files you made, and pictures and movies etc. yes, you can safely delete them with windows explorer or dragging them to the trash bin, just be careful you don't have program files with strange file extensions ie; dll, bin, cfg, dat, etc.

I deleted the programme thro' "add or remove hardware" so I cannot see a programme to add. Checked all the speaker cables etc. etc.

I do have XP...........pls advise how to access SYSTEM RESTORE

thx

System Restore is in Start>All Programs>System Tools, but it's only helpful if you already created Restore Points in the past, points to refer to in the present.

If these points are not created, forget it. There's nothing to refer to.

Besides, even with past set Restore Points, the system will not restore programs deleted or un-installed, only re-arrange the registry system, so that it may appear to run smoothly.

Miracles it doesn't do.

The best advice then, is to manually restore your Sound Driver, in most cases it's likely AC97 driver, but not in all cases.

Start>Control Panel>Add Hardware>...Follow through with the wizard, in which you have an option to load the missing driver from the internet. In most cases however, the driver is still in your system, only put out of commission.

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What I would do, however, is install windows afresh. Call me weird, but I like my system neat and clean of bugs, just for the heck of it. Once a year. For sports.

I'm pretty sure I've had deleted or un-installed programs RE-APPEAR when using SYSTEM RESTORE. Seems to me that it DOES restore the hard drive back to "as-was" condition....everything except FILES created, those stay. Even updates to programs get un-installed during a previous restore date.

Now that my box and several others I've looked at recently are working good and seemingly fast, I went in and CREATED a RESTORE POINT calling it " A GOOD POINT" so I can come back to it later.

You made two mistakes as far as I am concerned when you wrote as you assumed that for example that XP users display options the same way as you do, some don't!! Also, Vista users hay have something "better" too....:-

Start>All Programs>System Tools

You forgot to add in Accessories to it so:-

Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools - is correct here.

The other one you mentioned:-

Start>Control Panel>Add Hardware>

Could be right for some I believe, but in XP you have different ways of displaying and this might not work for some people who use the newer display version like myself....

Start>Control Panel>Printers and other Hardware>

......where sound cards are then I did not check further.....

"...I recently went to 'My Programs' and deleted all the program directories I rarely use, only now Windows behave erratically, and on boot I get all these blue screens telling me Windows is missing all these dll and vxd files, and in general nothing is the same anymore..."

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>Start>Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs

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I have XP, and the sound sometimes turns off on me.

I select ->All programs->Accessories->Entertainment->Volume Control.

Here there is an array of volume controls that you can adjust, hope it helps.

Regards JD.

Look behind it. Speaker cable un-plugged? Speakers have a separate power cord?

I have previously had the situation where one application "grabbed" use of the sound card, and did not release it once the application was closed.

The solution was to find the offending process and stop it manually - then look for an update of the application, or a re-install of the corrupted one.

Go to control panel select system, select hardware, select device manager, select sound, video game controller and you will be able to troubleshoot your sound cards and drivers and also download new drivers from this application.

Hope this helps.

Branson

Apart from what techno and sniccuss adviced you can go to device manager by right(left what you have set) clicking my computer properties and device manager to sound and game controler icon try refreshing , deleting , reinstalling (with your system cd), driver and check for status , do not disable, it should show device working properly ,restart sytem, you probably deleted some shared files while removing other files .also check driver update