The famous No Audio Device

[mwille64]

Seems to be a very common problem. Here is my story...
I have a DELL Inspiron 6400 with a SigmaTel High Definition Audio Codec and this is what I did to loose my sound:

I plugged in a plug and pray foto camera into my USB port.
My Windows XP (personal edition) recognised a new hardware and automatically installed the required driver.
All of sudden Windows crashed with a blue screen.
After re-booting several devices where gone (CD, video, sound, bluetooth to name a few)

Following some of the hints in this forum I did the following:

In save mode I uninstalled all effected device drivers
After re-booting I re-installed all devices.
Everything came back to normal, except for the sound.

Although the sound driver is the latest version (downloaded from Dell support sites) and all drivers are now supported to be working fine, the Sounds & Audio Devices dialog (control panel) says that there are No Audio Devices.

I scanned my PC for being hijacked, adware and viruses. I actually have software constantly monitoring my laptop so I'm certain it is clean.

Here is the amazing bit: If I reboot my laptop and run the DELL MediaDirect boot engine to simply play music or video files, everything works just fine.

So I think something happened to the registry. For some reason Windows cannot link the sound devices to its sound device manager.

Any help is much appreciated as I really would like to avoid to re-install Windows.

[Jeremy78]

Heres what you do, go to

Control Panel
system
Hardware Tab
System Devices

If you happen to see a big yellow ? anyway, right click on it and tell windows to install the drivers for it.

[mwille64]

I meanwhile managed to get my sound back. The Plug & Play Software Component Enumerator was corrupted (though the device manager did not report any anomaly). I came to the idea of checking it through other postings in this forum.

To fix the problem I uninstalled the enumerator and then used the Add Hardware Wizard…Add New Device…Manually Select From List…System Device…Microsoft…Plug & Play Softwarekomponenten Enumerator...to re-install the enumerator.

However, although the sound is back, I can’t get my microphone to work. I checked all the obvious settings, but there is nothing wrong configured.

Any ideas?

[jonon]

hi - trying to sort a problem of my own. This caught my eye.

Mind me asking...

1. how did you unistall enumerator ? - right click mine there's no uninstall option (I am in as administrator)

2. Setting aside above I went through process but add hardware but services> microsoft > revelaed no plug n play enumerator option ?

Cheers

[mwille64]

In the Device Manager under System Devices there is the Plug & Play Softwarekomponent Enumerator listed. At the time I got the yellow exclamation mark next to the device indicating a problem I got following options when right clicking on the device

1) Update driver
2) Disable
3) Uninstall
4) Scan for hardware changes
5) Properties

Having said this, trying to give you the answer and looking therefore at the options now I get only following options:

1) Update driver
2) Scan for hardware changes
3) Properties

Maybe Windows does not consider Uninstall a valid option unless something is wrong