My mum's laptop only makes one kind of sound

Iriah

Which is a sort of penetrating 'bloop', and it's driving her nuts. It only makes it when there's an error.

Otherwise it's perfectly silent, even when she tries to play music. I've fiddled with the sound and audio settings but nothing's changed.

What can I do?

Eat_Fire

Sounds like the sound card is not installed. Right Click "My Computer" go to the "Properties" choice. Then on the tabs at the top of the new window choose "Hardware" and then click the button labeled "Device Manager"

Once your in here you are looking for an icon with a yellow " ! " over it. There should be a category labeled "Sound, video, game controllers" See if a soundcard is listed.

If one is post what you see listed there:

If one is not - do the following:
Go to the manufactur's website and download the "sound drivers" for her laptop. The model of the laptop is usually printed on the bottom side next to its serial number.

Iriah

there is a whole list of Sound, video and game controllers with little yellow exclamation marks

in addition the DVD drive has the same exclamation mark (and my dad tells me it doesn't work either)



The sound card is a 'SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio' card, also there's a TV tuner

in properties it says:

Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)

Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device.


I remember I found this last time and I didn't understand how it couldn't find the hardware. What now?


edit: also the screen contrast and brightness can't be changed.

guess what level they're at?

The highest. Perhaps it's because 'video codecs' have a giant exclamation mark in front of them...

Synthetic Orange

Off the top of my head:

Run the hardware wizard.

Check the devices in System hardware to see if they've been turned off or are malfunctioning.

Uninstall + reinstall the drivers.

Iriah

I'll uninstall and reinstall the drivers, but I don't think it'll work for the same reason the other two ideas won't - the device manager says that it's installed but it just can't be found.


edit: according to forum anecdotes it can be fixed by reinstalling iTunes... that'd be nice...

Iriah

doing what a lot of websites recommended and deleting a certain registry key's Upper and Lower filters didn't work, and neither did reinstalling iTunes or the drivers. What on earth would do all this to optical drivers, codecs, and sound devices?

Eat_Fire

My guess is your chipset drivers aren't installed. These are basicly the drivers for most of the laptop (the motherboard).

A good way to double check this, is to install all of the drivers available at the manufacturer's website. Don't get redudant, but install the chipset,graphics,dvd, and sound controllers. Once that is done remove all the devices with the " ! " and restart.