Vista Tutorial - No "Windows" sound in Vista Business 32 SP1

I have a PC with a Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R (rev. 1.x) mobo (GIGABYTE - Product - Motherboard - Overview - GA-P35C-DS3R (rev. 1.x)). It comes with a on board Realtek ALC889A sound chipset. I have installed the latest sound driver from Gigabyte (GIGABYTE - Support - Motherboard - Driver - GA-P35C-DS3R (rev. 1.x)) but I have a weird case... The Windows events sounds are not working... When Vista starts, when I increase the sound using slide sound systray control, when some clip plays on a youTube clip... No sound! But when I use, for example aimp2 music player, or when I do the realtek audio manager sound test... I got the sound!!! I´m not sure, but I think the problem started after the SP1 upgrade. Best regards, Luis Santos

Hi, lcdsantos, and welcome to the forums.

Did you uninstall land then reinstall the sound drivers *after* installing SP1?

Hi John, thanks for the reply and for the welcome. Yes, I completely removed the sound driver after the SP1 install. In fact I did this after I noted the problem.

After the complete audio driver remove I reboot Vista and, in the new boot, the default Vista HD audio drivers were installed. This didn´t solve the problem. With default Vista audio driver I got the exact same problem: no sound on Windows apps the seems to address the sound requests by calling Vista procs.

Applications that seems to access directly the sound drivers works OK. I can list GOM Player (GOM software - Free, Simple, Light, It just plays! - GOM Media Player, GOM encoder) and AIMP2 (AIMP2: Home Page) as apps that sounds (literally) OK.

After this I reinstalled my mobo audio drivers (which claims to inlcude Microsoft UAA Driver), downloading the latest version from Gigabyte site. I see that Realtek drivers sucessfully replaced the default Vista HD audio driver, but without solving the problem.

It´s very weird the fact that some apps can reproduce sound and others (Vista audio effects and web browsers, IE and Firefox included) can not...

That is a weird problem - hopefully someone can chime in on this one because you're having this with the standard Windows driver as well....

One question - what audio devices do you have plugged in?

Yeah, although I´m a newbie in the forum I´m a PC user since my first 286 . In general I´m able to fix such problems myself, but this one is driving me crazy !

I have just a 2.1 speaker set. It´s a low budget Edifier X-100 (Edifier Discontinued Speakers). The set comes with a single stereo P2 plug. The sound signal goes first to the subwoofer and then is pass-throughed to the front speaker. The subwoofer it´s not a real one, as it´s not pluged into the LFE jack output.

I take it that you have selected Windows Sounds to play?

Hi! I have selected windows events sound to work. But none of work. As I stated no "Windows" sounds works, including the Vista startup welcome sound.

A couple of things you could try. Right-click Computer go to Properties. Call up Device Manager at left.
Go to Sound, Video and Game controllers and uninstall your Realtek ALC889A
Reboot and let Vista reinstall it and find the drivers.

Or...

When you click the taskbar sound icon is the volume turned up as far as it will go?
Right-click that icon and open the Sounds tab. Try changing the Sound Scheme.

try a start up repair. that has fixed some odd issues for me, one of them was no sound.

I tried this already. Did not help. The default MS Vista drivers were installed Ok after the reboot, but the problem persisted with no change on its behaviour. After this I downloaded again and installed the latest audio driver from my mobo site. No change...

Yes, the sound is on. As I stated the sound works nicelly when using the the audio driver config applet test. And when using apps that looks to work "directly" with the audio drivers, as AIMP2, that uses the BASS library.

I will try it again (uninstall, reinstall, everything...) tonight. I´m currently on my job using a PC with XP and 1-core CPU and 1Gb RAM. I miss my personal PC (no pun intended) with 4-core CPU with 4Gb RAM...