Silent computer

[Morbihan]

I'm looking for a little help please.

We have a HP pavilion 7955 and it is working well apart from the fact that there isn't any sound from the speakers.

We recently had the hard drive cleaned , emptied and re loaded when my son had a new graphics card installed and possibly it is since then there hasn't been any sound. If you listen carefully the computers 'box' is making the music etc but nothing from the speakers. I have tried going though all the panneau de configuration sections relating to speakers but as yet haven't had any luck.

Appreciate any ideas other wise it's back to the computer repair guy - again!

[suein56]

Morbihan

This might be too simple an answer, but...

After we moved in the UK and reconnected the computer we had no sound from the speakers either - looking round the back of the tower we discovered that I had plugged the speaker wire into the wrong slot - there were 2 the same colour, one produced sound the other didn't. We switched the wire to the other slot and 'bingo' sound once more!

Sue

edit: just noticed (!) you said you had the harddrive 'emptied' - have you perhaps deleted some software associated with the soundcard, or even the internal connection to the soundcard - we had that happen once too. Just opened up tower and reconnected the cable.

[Jeremy]

Morbihan,

Suggest 1, try cables first

2, settings on control panel, volume may be on low or mute

3, settings on administrator mode, same as 2.

4, could you test any other known working speakers?

ie have the speakers themselves been damaged?

5. Give up, get mad and call someone else in to do all the above, and pay them for it...

GOOD LUCK..Jeremy

[tel]

When you had your Hard drive formatted, did you re-install the drivers for your sound card?, if not your computer doesn't know it is there.

Another possibility is that the cable from your sound card to your CDRom is not connected.

[Gyn_Paul]

Have you tried plugging a pair of headphones into the sockets on the back?

What operating system are you using ? (windows '98 ? ME ? XP ?)

[Morbihan]

Thanks for all the replies.

I have tried to work through them as follows – from SPQ -  the speakers cable is plugged in to the correct socket, my son took the back of the computer lat night and said he couldn’t see any obvious unconnected wires.

Jeremy – the settings isn’t on mute but don’t know about administrator mode where would I find that?  We have tried another set of speakers and they didn’t work either and there hasn’t been any accidents with the speakers so don’t think they are damaged.

Tel – the guy that installed the new graphics card  has supposedly done all he had to make it work and my son didn’t notice any unattached wires when he had the back off yesterday but it could be the cable from the sound card to the CD rom. Perhaps I’m going have to take it to him again as we really don’t know where to look.

Gyn Paul – we are using Windows XP. When I plugged a headphone into a little pale green socket marked ‘out’ I could hear the music from a CD playing and could control the volume with the volume control and the mute worked! Still nothing from the speakers though.

I’ll try any more suggestions as they come, if not then as Jeremy said I may need to take it to some one else for them to work through all the possibilities they can think of.

Thanks again.

[Gyn_Paul]

Morbihan,

My first though is that if there is something coming out of the green socket, there’s no obvious reason (other than a fault on the audio card) why the line out socket shouldn’t work too. However, below are some things to check… (you might be wise to print this off first)

 

Given that you are running XP….

 

Go START/CONTROL PANEL/SOUNDS & AUDIO DEVICES then on the ‘volume’ tab click on ‘advanced’ to bring up the whole mixer, check nothing is muted or has the fader right down, now close that and check  ‘speaker volume’ and then ‘advanced’ and ensure that a set of speakers is actually selected. Come out of this and click on the ‘hardware’ tab. Run down the list of things in the box and confirm that everything reports “working properly” especially anything that reports a PCI Slot location. On this one click on ‘properties’ and check that the device usage box shows ‘device enabled’.

 

If you can hear music through the cans socket on the front of the CD drive, and through the cans socket on the back and none of the above has made any improvement with the (known good) speakers, then I suspect that either you have a driver problem (unlikely if you can get an output from the green socket), or the card is not seated properly in the slot (really clutching at straws now!) or that the card has ceased to function correctly, or is ‘buggered’ as the technicians would say.  Bit extreme I know, but you couldn't put your hand to another computer with a sound card you could swop and try could you?

 

good luck,

 

paul

 

 

Actually I posted this, then went and had a cup of coffee and then re-read the whole thread including reading your last detailed reply properly and I'm more and more convinced that if you can mute and control the level in the cans socket then - if all the above check out - it is a physical problem with the card or the line out socket.

You could also try moving the card to a different PCI slot, but just re-seating it might effect a cure.