No sound but hardware all appears OK

Recently, after an unsuccessful attempt to upgrade to Windows 7, my reinstalled Vista Home Premium 64bit, after operating normally for a while, lost sound completely.

I cannot pinpoint the event that prompted this malfunction and instead of trying to toubleshoot the onboard Realtek High Definition Audio, I installed a Diamond Xreme Sound 5.1 card running a C-Media Electronic driver ver. 6.12.8.1737, which is the latest for this sound card.

The sound card worked fine, after a restart, producing rich sound via Logitech's X-210 2-speaker-plus subwoofer system.

As long as I kept the system on Sleep, the sound worked fine. As soon as I turned the computer off for the night last night, the system reloaded with no sound playing whatsoever.

I have disabled the onboard Realtek High Definition Audio under Device Manager as well as the ATI High Definition Audio Device that appeared after I installed a Gigabyte HD 5770 graphics card BEFORE I installed the sound card.

The only active audio devices now are the C-Media PCI Audio Device (Diamond sound card) and the Logitech Mic QuickCam S7500.

Under Sound in the Control Panel, the only playback device is Speakers that are checked and are reported OK by the system as part of the Diamond sound card.

Under Recording, the following devices appear:

C-Media Microphone currently unavailable
Line-In C-Media Audio Device (speakers) checked and working
C-Media Aux device currently unavailable
C-Media CD player currently unavailable
C-Media Stereo Mix currently unavailable
C-Media Wave currently unavailable
Logitech Mic Working

Under Sounds Play Windows Startup sound is checked.

After installing the latest C-Media driver and restarting the computer, I receive faint sound from one of the Logitech speakers with volume turned to 100 pc.

But no stereo, strong sound....!

Any ideas about how to resolve this will be greatly appreciated.

I don't know if this will work or not.

But occasionally I have had to go into the help section for a desktop, and look through the items for the sound/speakers.

For some of these, the sound troubleshooter will start up, and then suddenly ask me if I would like to turn on the speakers so troubleshooting can start.

I do so, and they work fine after that. This wasn't under Vista, but has happened in Win98SE and WinXP with 2-3 computers a year.

In the different sound windows (playback, recording), right click on a free space and enable the the 2 messages. Then you have access to everything and can check the details.

Thank you much for your replies. Yesterday, I resorted to a local Vista wizard who dealt with the problem rather radically: he uninstalled and reinstalled Vista and then he went through each and every one of the mobo's drivers, found new ones, installed them, then physically removed the sound card after uninstalling the device, put it back, installed the new drivers, rebooted... and there is sound...! This whole thing took some four hours to complete. So far, the solution is working.

BlueLeader said:

Thank you much for your replies. Yesterday, I resorted to a local Vista wizard who dealt with the problem rather radically: he uninstalled and reinstalled Vista and then he went through each and every one of the mobo's drivers, found new ones, installed them, then physically removed the sound card after uninstalling the device, put it back, installed the new drivers, rebooted... and there is sound...! This whole thing took some four hours to complete. So far, the solution is working.

Click to expand...

That was a radical solution indeed. But it's good that you got your problem fixed. Happy listening.