Sound card Woes

Hello fellas,
I'm having problems with the onboard soundcard on my Asus P5K Pro motherboard. I have had this mobo since christmas and has always worked with XP with out ever having any problems.

Last week i installed the RC and initially all seemed to go well. I downloaded the Realtek Vista drivers from the Asus website and installed with the "recomended configuration." This seemed to work properly and i happily continued on my way. A few days ago when i turned on my PC and whacked in a CD i realised there was no sound coming out of the speakers. Upon futher inspection i realised there were no sounds coming out from the pc at all. I also realised that the Realtek GUI was no longer detecting the insertion of jacks into the socket.

My board has 5.1 audio outputs so i plugged the speakers into the other outputs to no avail. I did note however that the Realtek software did detect the insertion of a jack into these outputs but refused to spit anything out of them.

I decided to uninstall the driver and try to reinstall. Upon attempting this it repeatedly failed due to "not having the correct OS." When at last it did start to install it gave me a "realtek driver failed to install" screen. This scared me......

After a day of fiddling around i magically made it work and i was back where i started (not recognizing front jack, ingnoring the output of others.) So i decided to put in a old PCI card i found in the rubish bin :) It's a Creative labs CT4810 i think. I found some XP drivers and attempted an install. The drivers installed but when i attempted to use that driver for the so far unknown "multimedia audio device" i couldn't find it in the list of drivers. After reading further i started to think that the card wasn't PnP. *Shreek* Can PCI cards be non-PnP?

Anyway, i'm unsure now as to the origins of the error and am left audioless. I'm starting to think it could be a hardware error due to the failure to detect the insertion of jacks and the recent movement (i moved my desk to vacuum behind it) of the PC. The cable to the speakers was also very taught. It is still under warranty (the mobo, not the system, i built the system) so i might take it back.

Any helpz plox?
Help with the sound card would be nice :)
Thanks in advance.

Also i probably posted in the wrong section.... didn't see the "Sound and Audio" section. Could an admin please move it :)
Thanks

Simple suggestion. If is a driver issue, look to the manufacturer not the OEM for the latest drivers. Even if is an emended sound card, should be able to find more recent drivers than Asus is providing.

Now people get up in arms about this - myself once included - but if you think about it... most OEM's are providing support for a multitude of products, both for XP and Vista (and beyond). To expect the OEM to continually update to the latest drivers for every hardware component of every product they release is simply not feasible. If you are going to turn either to a pre-release or even a full retail release, you need to be prepared to do a little leg work of your own.

Thanks for the reply, i tried the 7 drivers but i'm getting the same results. I'm quite sure now it's a hardware problem. I'm going to put my old Windows XP HDD back in and see how it goes....

Righty o. I plugged my old IDE HDD with win xp on it and guess what? It works. BUT Even in XP it doesn't detect the imput of my speakers. This has brought me to realise that the problem has come from Windows 7 failing to recognize the insertion of a jack into the front audio plug. In Windows XP regardless of wether something is "plugged in" or not, the OS still outputs audio.

This is a *******. Does anyone know how to get the old realtek audio manager in windows 7 so i can choose to output "front" audio through another jack (as i don't use 5.1?) Otherwise i'm gonna have to find out how the motherboard detects something being plugged (probably a little metal clip of some sort) and bend it or something so it is "allways plugged in."

OR

Does anyone know how to bypass the "speaker detection" and force it to play audio
whatever the cirumstances.

Also to techno, i tried the 7 drivers, comes out the same but i'll leave them installed, thank you.

I have fixed it!! That jack is just rooted. This man here is a genius. Realtek HD Changing Jack output reassignments ( FIX )