Windows 7 Issue with audio devices

davbeisner

New Member
Ok, I have an HP laptop which initially had Vista 64 on it. I reformatted and reinstalled with Windows 7 64 Ultimate. After the install, I went to HP's website and downloaded all their drivers and packages for my laptop, for Win7 64.

However, periodically my sound would just simply quit working and I'd have to reboot. Well, this morning when I noticed it wasn't working, I was in the middle of other stuff and couldn't reboot right away. So instead I tried going to the device manager and disabling the audio device and then re-enabling it to see if it would work (i've done this plenty of times in Vista and XP and it's worked sometimes). Well, where I appear to have made a mistake is in going to the sounds and devices panel, instead of the device manager. When I hit the "disable" command on the audio device, instead of going gray or showing up with a red x, it just disappeared. I can still see my audio devices just fine in my device manager, but they're not showing up in the sounds and devices panel. Device manager says they're working fine, and I've tried reinstalling drivers, but to no avail. There's nowhere in the sounds and devices panel for me to scan for new devices.

I've got no clue what to do at this point... ideas, anyone? Thanks so much!
 
UPDATE:

I went into the Device Manager and uninstalled all the audio devices. Then I ran a scan for hardware changes and Windows found and re-installed all the audio devices (and several others that had failed to install when I updated to Windows 7!). Now all the audio device options show up in the sounds and devices panel where they're supposed to be. I can even play audio and see the green bar jumping in the mixer panel in accordance with the level of the audio. However, I still can't hear any sound coming out of the speakers. Any suggestions?
 
UPDATE:

The sound output from the headphones jack IS working, just not from the laptop speakers. FWIW, this laptop has mute/volume controls above the keyboard, and they all are working (the audio mixer reflects what they're doing). However, the mute button always turned red when I had the sound muted, and it is consistently red right now (even though the mixer panel shows the sound being muted/unmuted as I press the button...)
 
davbeisner:
Hello and welcome to the forums. Take a look in the services console.
Type services.msc into the search box and hit enter
Scroll down to
Windows Audio double click it select start and set the startup type to automatic
and
Windows Audio Endpoint Builder double click it select start and set the startup type to automatic
aside from that take a look in control panel and see if the driver added an additional applet to manage the device, realtek drivers will often add a Realtek HD Audio Manager.
Additionally maybe let us know what type of sound card it is along with the HP's model name and or number, someone may have specific experience that they may have to share regarding your hardware. You never know, a lot of people read these forums.
 
Thanks, Randy... You're right... I did forget to mention the type of sound card I have. My bad.

The laptop is an HP Pavilion dv7-1245dx, and it's running a soundcard which (as best as I can tell) is called an IDT HD Audio Controller.

I checked services.msc and both audio services are running and set to automatic start. I also checked the control panel, and sure enough, there was an IDT HD Audio Control Panel, which used to reside in the system tray when I had Vista on here. I checked around in there, and confirmed that everything is set as it should be... Everything appears to be exactly right, it's just that my speakers aren't actually emitting any sound.

I appreciate y'all's help!
 
It could be that when you uninstalled the sound device windows has set it to default to another device like ATI HDMI Output in which case it would be as simple as selecting the IDT device and making it the default
 
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