Toshiba Satellite A660 Audio driver problems  

Hi everyone.

I've spent a harrowing couple of days fixing a problem with an audio feed to a TV via an HDMI cable.

The computer is a Toshiba satellite laptop A660 part number PSAW3A-07T00R and the television is a Panasonic ET5 flatscreen LCD unit.

I had almost gotten to the point of re-installing the original working HDD. I had installed a larger hybrid 1 TB unit rebuilt with Win 7 when I read a comment that some manufacturers load their hardware with "bespoke" drivers to "enable" all of the facilities that their hardware will support.

Previously the laptop would quite happily feed both video and audio to the TV, but after the rebuild of the HDD the audio was missing, on the TV, when attached to the TV via an HDMI cable.

When investigating the >Control panel>hardware and sound>manage audio devices options, only the on board RealTek loudspeakers appeared and all attempts to alter this to show the TV audio capability failed.

Finally, I discovered this site

http://www.iprotocol.net/toshiba-satellite-a660-drivers-for-windows7-64bit/

downloaded the graphics and audio drivers and installed them ( I might say they were earlier versions than were currently in use). Upon rebooting, with the TV active, the audio channel of the TV appeared in the audio device options and became the "default" connection condition which worked without trouble. I suspect that other manufacturer's hardware drivers would be accessible at the same site with some site examination.

My conclusion is that if you have an audio problem to a TV via an HDMI connection, particularly where the computer is a laptop or similar device, then a possible solution is to get the manufacturer's "modified" drivers from a trusted source and load them.

If they work then change your "upgrade" settings in Win 7 to so that you get advice about them and then select the upgrades such that any alteration to working drivers of the video system do not get changed - or if you want to try them load them separately so that you can rollback to a previous setting without altering any other OS changes that are "valuable".

Hopefully my experience and this advice will shorten the timescale of attempts to solve this type of problem

Cheers

Damusortson