OK, so what happened…
Well, as I said last time, I disabled the sound – speakers and card – to see if I could improve the quality. Unfortunately, I then lost all sound next time I logged in.
I know you’re probably thinking the same as I was – what a stupid thing to do! But hey, we all make mistakes and apparently I’m not the only one.
A quick search online for the term ‘no audio output device is installed’ (this is what the sound icon kept telling me) and I find this is a very common problem.
And the reasons for this range from updated drivers to those silly people that decide to disable everything – not naming any names…
The most popular solution seems to be a quick restore of previous system settings, which has worked for the majority of people I’ve read about. This option was easy to locate and I choose a recent restore point and click ‘Next’ in the wizard.
It goes about its business with little progress bars and the like, re-starts itself as it’s meant to and there we have it – a window pops up, ‘there was an error, Windows has not restored previous settings: the sound will never come back – NEVER!’ OK, so I made the last bit up but you get the idea.
By this time it was starting to seem hopeless, I couldn’t get my head round why anyone wouldn’t ever want sound from their computer and therefore why this would ever happen!
Anyway, a few deep breaths later and I decided to have a second look at the control panel. I find ‘Sound: manage audio devices’ and click on it – ‘no audio output device is installed’. Very helpful!
Instead I open the ‘Device manager’ and click on ‘sound, video and game controllers’. At last – a sign of life! A listing for the speaker and sound card I disabled. I click on one to get: ‘this device is working properly’. Could this computer be more annoying? I am quite angry by now, how can this not be made simple!
Eventually, after much tweaking, I roll back the driver on one of the two and update the driver on the other – that was when the little cross disappeared from the speaker icon in the bottom right. It was on my next login that sound was fully restored, and you know what… this time it sounded a whole lot better!
xxx
