No surround sound through HDMI to AV Receiver

I am connecting my laptop to my AV receiver via HDMI cable. With both streaming video (netflix, hulu) and various video formats, I am not getting any surround sound. Is there a setting in Windows 7 I am missing?

Thanks for any help!

Depends on the capability of your system. On SOME systems the digital or HDMI is only two channel stereo. Also, some audio streams are only stereo, not surround and unless your sound system synthesizes these to surround you will only get two channel stereo.

Thanks for the response. How can I check the capabilities of my system on this or whether the audio source is coded into surround?

I am not a total beginner, but am new to using my computer for multimedia purposes.