O/T: laptop sound problem

Sorry for the O/T post and thanks to all who take the time to read.

I get no sound at all, including system sounds, from the built in speakers as well as the headphone port. Device manager shows all hardware, does not show any conflicts, disabled hardware or missing drivers. Volume is set as high as possible, definitely not muted. However, I have noticed that the speakers will randomly display the "mute" icon, and will be set to mute. I set the volume back to max but still get no sound.

Older laptop, HP Omnibook 6000, XP Home SP2, Intel PIII 700Mhz, ESS Maestro 3i mixer for sound, DirectX 9.0c, SoundBlaster Pro 16 bit audio chip.

Yesterday Windows Update showed a newer driver for the ESS Maestro 3. It downloaded fine, but installation failed, said "access denied". How can I not have access to update the darn driver??? Only one user account on this pc and it is an admin account. I tried Windows Update today and it sait "there was an error, page is unable to display".

What am I missing to make the sound work?

Thanks,

Anthony

I will be clear. It is likely the sound blaster system that is toast. I also believe it will be way more costly to fix (if a replacement can be found) than a much better computer would cost. Jim

If I have this correct, your problem began AFTER you updated the sound driver? Can you roll back the driver? Something else you might try if you have a restore CD that contains the drivers, would be to delete the driver and then try to locate the driver from the CD, whic may not work if the drivers are compressed...so try to search the CD for drivers first. You would certainly hate to end up rebuilding your computer and losing documents because you inserted the restore CD and said YES when you should not have, because once it asks if you are sure and you say YES and it starts, too late to stop. If you can't do that, as much as I don't care for HP, I will give their websight credit for being pretty good at driver downloads. I don't know if they still do, but there was a time when they could detect your hardware and tell you what came loaded with it, take you to it, and go right down the list of original drivers and download. They also used to be pretty good about locating the model of machine by serial number, then once there, same thing, the original drivers and downloads listed. Who knows, maybe you downloaded a newer driver that won't work with the older chipset or something. Once HP and Compaq merged, bad got worse.

One thing that HP was bad about when it came to loading drivers, sometimes there are specific orders that drivers need to be loaded in, dependencies, and HP often failed to mention that, causing other problems down the line. I don't think that you will find anywhere at the HP website a driver install order, and it can matter. For the record, I don't own an HP, although I have customers that use them for 9-1-1 dispatching positions. The towers seem to be ok. A year or two ago, I bought a new HP laptop loaded with Windows 7. That lasted about a week until I gave it away. It was either that, or go crazy and commit suicide to put me out of my misery, so I gve it to someone that I didnt like. They thought I was being nice to them, but I was doing myself a favor and being evil at the same time.

There was a pretty good HP users website that might be helpful, especiall for driver install orders.

Good luck.

Mark

Sound was not working when my neighbor gave it to me. Device Manager showed "driver not installed" for the ESS Maestro 3. I reinstalled the driver(had Windows search automatically, locally and online). Driver was installed, said everything was good but still no sound.

Sorry, I should have been more clear about that the first time around.

Thanks,

Anthony

Buy a cheap USB external sound card. Google USB sound card.

For one thing, if you connect it to the Internet, it is not going to stand a chance against rootkits with it just being SP2. You need to update it with ALL high priority updates including SP3 & all subsequent updates if you want to have a chance of keeping it free from viruses.

That may or may not also help your sound issue.

Once you have it fully service packed, I'd uninstall the sound card with device manager, reboot and let it "discover" the sound card again. When it does, point it the subdirectory with your latest sound card drivers and see if that works.

Also, make sure you don't have any unknown devices in device manager. If you have a PCI device with a yellow flag on it, you probably need to download Microsoft UAA driver first, and then install your sound card driver.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888111

Without that Windows component installed most/all sound drivers can't work - and depending on how Windows was reinstalled (especially with the older versions like SP2 XP), it was pretty common to have to reinstall that UAA manually.

There is also a small chance it is a hardware failure - but out of hundreds of sound issues I've fought over the years, I've only seen 1 machine (and it was on a desktop just last week), where the sound card truly had quit and had to be replaced.

Howard
Universal Audio Architecture driver

I would first try "Restore" back to a time when sound was working properly.Try at your volume icon raising the sound bar some.I raise and lower the sound volume all the time by this icon adjustment.Some times I forget that I had lowered the volume by this method ,usually little or no sound when this happens.

you may want to set all the volume levels midway instead of at the highest setting. I came across a few systems that if all the volume levels were set to the highest setting you got no sound at all. There should be an advanced setting so you can see all the volume levels for all the sound devices.