I have a laptop that has a front jack

[catabryna]

that you can plug in earphones or speakers, which I do often because the on-board speakers are terrible. I turned off the computer the other night and when I turned it on the next morning, I got no sound out of the speakers. I thought perhaps it was the speakers, so I plugged in the earphones and got the same... nothing.

Could this be a corrupted driver? If the jack had failed at any other time, I'd say the jack is probably toast but, because the problem occurred between taking down the computer for the evening and rebooting the system in the morning, I'm wondering if it might not be a driver issue rather than a hardware issue.

The computer is running OS Win 7.

Any thoughts?

[canetoad]

1. Corrupted driver

Is the computer equivalent to the biblical forty days and forty nights. No-one really knows what's going on but it sounds good!

Make sure you haven't muted the sound. Click on the systray speaker icon, open everything you can, make sure it's turned on and volume is turned up. Click the little speaker icon at the top of the volume slider, check that your inbuilt speakers are the default device and they are enabled and turned up.

It's far more likely to be a system setting than a corrupt audio driver, no matter what anyone else says :)

[catabryna]

3. lol!

Loved your answer... but, seriously, I know how to use a computer!

eta: :P

[catabryna]

2. Disregard...

apparently the 3rd reboot fixed the problem.

[canetoad]

4. Didn't mean to offend

If a few reboots fixed the problem, I'd be looking at how much stuff is jostling for prominence on computer boot.

With laptops, it's not unusual to have 50 or 60 processes trying to load and run at boot. As a guide, a fresh reload of WinXp with no modem, no AV should have about 22 running processes. Double that for Win 7. Add a few for pre-installed laptop crap and a few more if you have Flash, Acrobat, etc.

We can rule out faulty speakers. What I'd be doing is turning off EVERYTHING in msconfig, boot and reboot several times and see if sound was ok. Then turn on everything and see if you can replicate the problem.

[catabryna]

6. I'm not offended, I was kidding....

:) Now, can you tell me how eject the cup holder on the side of my computer? :argh:

eta: this is a clean install of Windows 7 after wiping the hard drive. There should be nothing on this computer except the Windows program. I have a licensed copy of XP here but it won't install on this computer. I'd love to have it back since it has a built in e-mail program and is much more familiar to me. Other than that, Win 7 is the next best thing. Vista is a nightmare.

[BlueJazz]

5. What canetoad said plus ...Sometimes Windows updates can wreak havoc...

...with certain types of drivers.

That's all :)

[canetoad]

7. Yup Jazz

These days, audio drivers, on their own, rarely cause problems. Now it was different years ago, when you installed a PCI audio card to improve performance.

Nowadays, Mobos have pretty standard audio chips. The drivers are installed at system set-up; usually in the same process that installs networking.

Jazz is right about updates. Not everything that comes down the tubes is tested and working and if you allow everything to auto update you run a huge risk of letting buggy patches slip onto your machine. I don't let anything auto update, instead opting to check the web for glitches and problems before installing updates.

[catabryna]

8. I have updated the computer...

but, I have automatic updating turned off and periodically go out and check it myself. That way, if I get a glitch, I'm able to determine where the problem might be and I can roll back the computer to a prior restore point or find the offending update and remove it. I also hated getting update messages nearly every single day.

[catabryna]

9. Thank you. :) nt