No sound in xp

This seems to be a common problem in the sound driver forum, but none of the solutions that I have seen have helped. I have an ASUS K8N-E deluxe MB with integrated sound: Realtek AC'97, ALC 850 codecs, and cannot get any sound. Device mgr shows everything working properly, no !, etc. I have looked in BIOS and am as sure as I can be that the audio in enabled. (The sound has worked in the past, but I am not sure what I may have done to render it non-functional.) I have updated the drivers for both the Nvidia chipset and the audio drivers, from ASUS, Realtek and Nvidia, all to no avail. The sound does work; there is an ASUS or Realtek applet in the sys tray called Sound Effect that has a speaker test, and sound does come out of the speaker with this test. However, if I go to the Sounds in Control panel, the whole thing is grayed out. No volume control, the Audio tab shows sound playback, MIDI, etc as "No Playback Devices" and is grayed out. Windows xp does not think that there is a sound device installed, althoug it lists it in device mgr and says that it is working. And it does work at some level.

Welcome to WD forums coopermtn.

My what a confusing question ! .. so it seems appropriate for me to have 'first pop' at it ..

So as far as I can follow this, you can definately get sound of some sort.

There's apparent 'good' entries in device manager, yet nothing available in conrol panel under sound & audio devices ?

If I've managed to fathom out your symptoms right, then given that you've been trying lots of different audio drivers, my diagnosis would be that at some point, due to the order of application of patches xp has found 'nearly' but not quite the right driver for what it thought it had at some point ..

(I'm not so sure how much sense that makes if you don't understand what chipset patches do & the importance of applying them first. So I guess I'd better explain ;) ... Chipset patches correct various items of code relating to 'system components' that windows 'needs' to function, these corrections must be in place before adding devices which depend on them.)

Fixing this can be most annoying ! As because of how windows detection etc works, it'll keep thinking its already got a suitable driver & stubbornly won't let you over-ride it to what you want when you want !

So try disabling your sound in bios for now, restart & make sure nothing is appearing in device manager for sound at all, then re-apply the chipset patches, then re-enable the s/c in bios & then reboot. (this is the point it seemingly may do 'what ever the hell' it wants :rolleyes: ) If windows tries to refind your soundcard, we want to make sure we can choose the driver & point it the s/c driver you found at asus - if it decides its already got one, try forcing it to update through device manager again to the driver you found at asus.

Hope this helps - these are tricky ones :).

Confus-ed:

A google search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ut&btnG=Search) provided by someone (Veets) on another forum lead to the advice to run windows services manager (services.msc) which showed windows audio to be disabled and I could set it to automatic; after rebooting, sound is back. Thanks for you input.

coopermtn

Thanks for coming back with your solution :thumbs:

Basic s/c troubleshooting 101, would indeed include making sure the flipping audio service is on :knife: (plug & play is supposed to turn it on when it finds a driver, but its not called 'plug & pray' for nothing !)

So Asus's test utility then seems not to use the windows audio service, I shall remember that for next time, I had 'small donkeyed' it would :rolleyes: (made as a-s-s of u & me, as my old teacher used to say.. thus I assumed it was on).