Acer Aspire 3690 w/ Conexant: "No Audio Output Device is installed"

Greetings and salutations.

I recently upgraded an Acer Aspire 3690 to Windows 7 (32bit) and everything went well, almost. See, for life of me I can't get audio to work. (That old chestnut.) The speaker icon in the notification area displays the white cross/red circle and informs me that "No Audio Output Device is installed". Fine. Okay. Just a driver problem, right?

Well, Device Manager is showing no discrepancies and the two devices associated with the Aspire's audio chipset (Conexant) are installed and happy (Modems/HDA CX11270 Soft Modem, and System devices/High Definition Audio Controller). But there is no entry for Sound, Video and Game Controllers, and that's what concerns me. Acer's driver support page for the 3690 tells me that Realtek powers the audio, but regardless of the potentially compatible audio drivers I've tried to install (most of the Conexant drivers fail with "Driver installation failed: could not find the MEDIA device for this driver" and the Realtek drivers either have no effect or BSOD the machine) I've had no success.

Now if I was running XP then MUAA would, I'm convinced, resolve the issue, but as far as Windows 7 is concerned I'm at a loss. Best I figured, the Realtek drivers should latch onto the High Definition Audio Controller then provide an Audio Output Device, but nothing's happening. I'm convinced that the physical hardware's fine because the Soft Modem diagnostics provide feedback, and the BIOS has been updated to 3.60.

Anyway, any help would be GREATLY appreciated, lest I source a PCMCIA sound card that'll output through the laptop's speakers...

Thanks.

I'm assuming you upgraded from Vista/XP. With and upgrade to a different OS and there are devices that don't work right away with the latest drivers tells me that the BIOS for the MOBO needs to updated/flashed. I would start there first. Sometimes the old BIOS are just not compatible with a new version of an OS.

bassfisher6522 said:

I'm assuming you upgraded from Vista/XP. With and upgrade to a different OS and there are devices that don't work right away with the latest drivers tells me that the BIOS for the MOBO needs to updated/flashed. I would start there first. Sometimes the old BIOS are just not compatible with a new version of an OS.

Updating the BIOS was one of the first things I did. I'm at 3.60 which, as far as I've been able to conclude, is the latest version.