[jenniferdurst]

I don't want to know how to fix this, I'm just curious as to why this would be happening...

My sound occasionally just stops working on my computer. I have to reboot to get it going again. I reinstall the driver and its fine for a while again. It has only happened since the last time I reformatted, too. Anybody got any ideas as to why?

[Captain_Trips]

hardware/software conflict. what new things have you installed recently?

[jenniferdurst]

Nothing at all. New Firefox, but it happens w/other programs

[Captain_Trips]

desktop or laptop? have you tried updating the drivers for the sound card?

[jenniferdurst]

yep and it was happening before i installed sp3 too. desktop

[Captain_Trips]

Very odd that a reboot fixes it. Maybe some issue with sound card enumeration?

Next time this happens you should check the device manager (control panel > system > hardware tab) to see if the sound card is still enumerating. Could be a physical detection issue.

Also . . . . as an interesting troubleshooting step, and a way to directly point blame towards the sound card (or the system implementation of the sound card), you should see if you can hook up a USB audio device, like some USB speakers or a USB headset. See if the sound goes out. If it doesn't then you can safely chalk it up to a sound card/motherboard issue . . . . if still having the same problem then you could go ahead and lay the blame on the operating system.

May be a silly question to someone who is pretty techy . . . . but have you checked Windows Update to see if there are any hardware related updates in reference to your sound card? Or even any sound card drivers that may come up under software.

This post has been edited by Captain_Trips: 14 March 2009 - 08:59 AM

[jenniferdurst]

Yeah, I've checked everything I could think of and I'm all out of updates to install. But with my luck it was one of those random ######ing updates that did it a while back.

I dont have any USB speakers nor headphones I'll try checking the device manager.

I guess an interesting thing that I neglected to mention is that I only notice it when I'm viewing flash (from any site), but after its gone..it's gone. No sound from itunes, not from vlc, not from the ######ing computer when I'm restarting. However, this was happening when I had 9 installed, and then I upgrated to flash player 10 so I guess I doubted that had anything to do with it.