no sound

About 1 month ago my sound stopped working. I tried reinstalling the drivers and the usual stuff that tech support tells you to do. None of it worked. I then bought a new sound card and installed it on a different PCI slot. The drivers installed fine and diagnostics showed nothing wrong, however, I still have no sound.
The weird thing, is I can disable my sound card and run onboard sound just fine. Heck, I even reformatted my hard drive, but without any luck. The speakers are brand new so I know it's not them. Also, I've tested with several other speakers and still no result.

What could the problem be and how do I fix it?

May be one of your Volume Control option can be mute. Go to Volume Control and check it.

How old is the machine itself?

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Originally Posted by eranga262154

May be one of your Volume Control option can be mute. Go to Volume Control and check it.

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I made sure that wasn't the problem ;) There's two options under hardware audio devices... One of them doesn't works (the real sound card) and the other (some kind of windows media device) does work.

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How old is the machine itself?

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Not old at all. Probably 6 months +/- 1 month. It was custom built and worked perfectly until now.


Maybe this will help: Around the time of my sound not working, I started getting a blue screen on startup almost everytime I booted my machine. It happens ALL the time. Sometimes I'll be working and get a blue screen. The message on the screen was: IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

It seems to be more of a hardware issue, but I replaced the sound card and put it in a different slot.


Thanks for the replies.

Did you uninstall,from Device Manager, the old sound card (and disable the onboard from BIOS)?

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Originally Posted by VBdynamic

Did you uninstall,from Device Manager, the old sound card (and disable the onboard from BIOS)?

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The first part I don't remember, as I've reformatted my harddrive since taking it out. Second question, yes. I've disabled the onboard sound and for testing it was enabled.

It could be a IRQ conflict or some other piece of hardware is bad. Was that all the error message, IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL? You can try googling it and see if that helps (seems like this can be caused by serveral things :( )

Check in device manager. If it cant secure an IRQ it will show up with and exclamation mark

Oh, you guys may have hit the nail on the head. I remember a while back getting a blue screen saying something about IRQ sharing. Following what you guys said, the device manager has two exclamation marks:

Standard Game Port
Raid Controller


I disabled the Raid Controller as I don't think I need it, but what about the Standard game port? It seems there are two of them... Isn't it weird that the actual sound device isn't showing as an irq sharing issue?

I think it can still be a conflict even if it doesnt show on that specific device.

If you dont need to use a game controller then you might as well disable it.

If you disabled onboard sound it should also free up some IRQ's, seems you dont use it.