No sound from headphones, only on Windows

Hello.

As in the title, the issue is that I most often have no sound from headphones on my laptop. I plug the headphones in, they are discovered by the system (I might even get pop up saying I plugged a device to the audio jack), but I hear no sound form them.

The fun part is that:

• This isn't persistent. Sometimes Windows boots and I have sound from headphones till I shut the laptop down. Most often, however, Windows boots and I have no sound from headphones till I switch the laptop off.
• The issue is limited only to headphones. Built-in loudspeakers work just all right all the time.
• I also have Linux Mint installed on my laptop. No such issues are present in Mint, I always have sound from my headphones there.
• This was not always happening. The laptop is pretty old, it came with Windows 7 HP 64bit preinstalled, and no such issues were happening. But then I installed Windows 10 Education from Dream Spark, and I bumped into the problem of having no sound from headphones. A few months ago, however, I did factory reset and again installed Windows 7 HP 64bit (thinking it was a Win10 specific issue), this system is installed on my laptop now, but to my astonishment the problem persists.

Any chances to somehow fix this?

The laptop is Asus X54C. It was in the warranty service a few times, always because of faulty HDD and/or RAM.

Edit: My device manager shows following sound devices:

• Intel(R) Display Audio Driver Provider: Intel(R) Corporation Driver Version: 6.14.0.3086
• Realtek High Definition Audio Driver Provider: Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Driver Version: 6.0.1.6454

The two audio devices are correct. Intel is for HDMI audio, Realtek for the PC audio.

To determine if its a problem with Realtek, since the Linux driver works OK, Uninstall the Realtek sound in the Device Manager and also uninstall the Realtek driver. Restart the PC and when Windows starts it should detect the sound and install the generic "High Definition" Audio driver. Then try the headset and see if it works. If it does the problem is with the Realtek driver and my suggestion is to get the latest driver direct from www.realtek.com

If it does not work with the Generic Windows installed High Definition audio driver, the problem would appear to be some other program is interfering and causing the problem.

Strange that Linux seems to be the cause. Works OK if you don't load Linux. Not sure what is causing that, unless the Linux sound driver is not releasing something.

What happens if you first power off the PC, after using Linux and before you boot into Windows. Do you still get the problem?