Sigmatel Audio Nightmare...

Hello all,

I have a frustrating problem with my Dell M1530 laptop. Switched it on this morning and the audio had completely gone. The speaker icon has a red cross next to it and when hovering the mouse over, it says "No Audio Output Device is installed".

Went to device manager to see what's going on, and was confronted with this



So as you can see, I have no actual sound category in the device manager. But a warning for the HD Audio, and the Composite bus enumerator (I have no idea what this is, could it be related?)

I thought the obvious solution would be to re-install the latest drivers from Dell. However this didn't want to work:



I then tried re-installing different types of the drivers in different ways (safe mode, run as admin etc). I also tried uninstalling the "High Definition Audio Controller" with the device manager, but same error message kept on popping up.

I then tried to update the drivers from within the device manager. When I try an automatic driver upgrade it tells me that I already have the latest drivers installed, and if I try a manual ("have disk") install then it says that the drivers are incompatible.

My last resort was to try a legacy driver install pointing it to the WDM folder where the Sigmatel drivers are, but that also told that the drivers could not be installed due to a hardware error.

I'll point out here that I have performed a boot diagnostic (provided by Dell) and the speakers definately work. I have also checked that it is not the headphone jack sensor problem that seems pretty common for Dell laptops.

The cause? Well the only thing that would have affected the system is the latest Windows updates that I have installed. I have looked through the updates but nothing relates to anything to do with the audio chips/bus. I have also tried a system restore previous to the windows updates but this had no effect.

After checking over the Dell support forums, and searching through google for the whole day I am completely stumped with this one. I'm really trying to avoid to re-install Windows as it will be a hell of a backup job for me.

Thanks for sticking with it, I will gladly accept any help I can!!

Regards,

Sam.

There are several devices listed with yellow errors, thus it would appear you have more problems than just the sound.

First, make sure everything is enabled in the BIOS (F2 - Setup). Second, reinstall the Intel motherboard chipset drivers and then restart the PC. Then check the Device Manager to see what devices are still showing an error. Finally, you need to use the Dell sound drivers, non-Dell's, from experience, either do not work or do not work correctly on most Dell's.

I do a lot of support on the Dell forum but mostly with Desktops. There are some knowledgeable techs that work the Laptop forum sections. It would be best to post on the Dell Laptop section.

As has been said you have several issues but for your Sigmatel these are the drivers I believe I used for my XPS Gen1 DELL laptop and note they are for Vista 32 and 64 bit so you should uninstall any drivers you have currently for the sound card, uninstall the card. Download CCleaner and DriveSweeper and run those to clean out anything to do with Sigmatel.

Run the expansion on the downloaded DELL drivers, get them at
Drivers and Downloads

Note they will load into a DELL folder. Reboot the PC and when it comes up with new hardware found it may just tell you drivers were not loaded, just go to the Device Manager and you will see the ? in yellow, select this and tell it to update driver and select let me choose and point it to the folder where the driver is, it should then see the Stack92 Sigmatel driver and load it. This all of course would be done in compatibility mode for Vista, let me know if I can help.