New
#1
PC sound problems. No system sounds, no audio.
Dell Studio XPS 8100 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.7GHz 6 GIGs of RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
I here as a last resort before formatting my hard drive.
A couple of weeks ago the sound on my PC up and died, for no apparent reason. Ran all the diagnostics/troubleshooting, checked my drivers (went so far as to uninstall/reinstall) and as far as my 'system' was concerned everything was working fine. But no sound. As a side note, Window Media player give me a "Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file." whenever I tried to play any music, but I don't get any errors with VLC, but still no sound. Sound tests get an error message when dealing with sound options in the Control Panel.
I am the dumb and have no restore points prior to my sound going as I failed to act when the sound initially died, and my most recent ones are post-sound death.
I searched online for other Windows 7 sound issues (and there were a lot), checked my system against the majority of the major issues, and the problems that others were experiencing (hardware compatibility issues/device manger setup and such) was not something I was experiencing.
I went so far as to reinstall Windows on a drive partition, and when I boot up using that OS I have sweet, glorious sound. So I figure that I have somehow borked something on my primary OS, that doesn't exist on the small partition.
Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.