Soundless

September 21, 2008 8:47 PM

Laptop sound problems for a friend.

My friend has a HP pavilion DV5000 laptop which the sound has recently stopped working. System sounds (the beep when you do something it doesn't like) still plays. Music, DVD, and everything else does not. The machine is running windows XP, which she did a complete restore. We updated it to service pack 3 and still no sound. Under sound and audio devices it says "No audio device." I have tried to reinstall the drive, but it fails when it doesn't detect a media device. Under device manager the following are listed. Audio Codecs, Legacy Audio Drivers, Legacy Video Capture Devices, Media Control Devices, and Video Codecs. Let me know if any more information would be helpful. I have also booted from a Ubuntu Live CD in hopes that that would be able to play sound, but it didn't produce anything other then a lot of crackling. I think this may be a hardware issue but i am hoping it not. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!

posted by ihadapony to computers & internet (5 comments total)

It's not the (cd/dvd) drive, it's the sound card. It should be in your list, but it's not showing up. It should have a ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. You can try re-installing the driver. Or you can just do them all here.
posted by lee at 9:28 PM on September 21, 2008

Crap, the Ati is your graphics, bleh. Go to the second link above and click through the model, operating system, then scroll down to sound and you'll find the drivers you need. sorry, it's late...
posted by lee at 9:36 PM on September 21, 2008

scroll down to Driver - Audio
posted by lee at 9:39 PM on September 21, 2008

I don't think that it's a driver issue, since I'm assuming it just went out one day, which prompted the windows restore. I suspect that it's a hardware failure. Especially considering it doesn't work after a restore, or in Ubuntu. The crackling means it's trying, but failing. If it didn't recognize anything at all, it'd be silent.

The good news is that you can buy a PCMCIA Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, and plug it into your cardslot, and get some decent audio, but only through headphones, or external speakers.

The bad news is either your motherboard is going bad or you have a loose connection somewhere in the sound system.

Good luck.
posted by mhp at 11:39 PM on September 21, 2008

A little follow up.

I have tried to install the drivers but they fail when they do not detect a sound device.

I was also thinking that it was a hardware but i was hoping it was not.
posted by ihadapony at 6:53 AM on September 22, 2008