Another urgent question

[ritaxis]

Say you have a relatively well-functioning (except some of the keys on the keyboard are a bit resistant to suggestion) six year old Fujitsu Lifebook laptop which is sadly running Vista, and the sound has cut out on it suddenly while you were clumsily trying to type on it..  The "volume mixer," which isn't a mixer in a real sense at all but only a volume slider-muter for windows, firefox, and the speakers separately, tells you that these are set to a nice loud level. The "sound" tab in the control panel says the Realtek driver is functioning properly. Plugging in the speakers from my desktop changes nothing. I do mean nothing -- the laptop doesn't announce that you've plugged in new hardware (which it did do when I plugged in the tv monitor, which was plugged in when the sound cut out, but the sound didn't return when I unplugged it), and the speakers don't show on the hardware list.

What do I look at next? This computer is kind of baffling to find my way around, and Frank doesn't remember anything about it either. Googling gets me a similar complaint being voiced in a forum or two, but no solutions.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Just the internal speakers. I have increased and decreased volume, and I've muted them and unmuted them. No change.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Well, you can go through the different tabs on the Control Panel Sound window, checking properties and configuration and using Test buttons and so on, to make sure everything seems to be set correctly.

You can use the Control Panel to get to the Device Manager, to verify that things like audio controllers and system speaker are enabled, and have it look for updated drivers for them. For that matter you could check for various updated drivers on the fujitsupc.com site as above.

If you want to totally reset the computer (not meaning to wipe its settings, but to possibly get it out of some weird mode it's gotten into), you can shut it down, unplug the power cable, remove the battery, and then hold the power button down for a minute. Then replace the battery and power cable, and restart.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I was just about to check all those, but this last rebooting seems to have done the trick for some mysterious reason.

Thank you!

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Well, that's good! Computers do strange things sometimes ...

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Sorry I couldn't be more help, I have had The Inexplicable Silence, but it's always been fixed by a restart.