no sound on compy

C

crackfeen

New Member
hi everybody, help a brother out..
i took my old lappy camping with me, and it rained the first night.. the next morning i wake up....lappy doesn't turn on... umm ok.. i figure humidity/condensation fine it will dry out and work again.. so that much is true it works now, but the computer no longer has sounds... and by that i mean any sounds, no boot sounds no sound card nothing.. under device manager, all the sound drivers are working fine, but in the control panel >sounds and audio devices, it says that there are no audio devices present..
problem is, this computer is old.. (dell latitude c840) and i'm not even sure how to approach it... i don't know if it's the soundcard itself that went bad or what it could be or how to test it.
i know winamp gives me "bad sound driver. Please install proper sound drivers or select another device in configuration. Error code: 88780078
 
hmmm thats odd, well the sound card can't really go bad persay because on laptop's they're intigrated into the motherboard. So your motherboard could be having issues. Was the laptop running all night and when you woke up it was off. The first thing i'd probably try is reinstalling the drivers. If that doesn't fix it then post back and let us know.
 
yeah the laptop was running all night.. well i fell asleep with it on and it woke up in a frozen state where i couldn't reboot it at all it would just beep at me...
but as far as the drivers go, it won't reinstall them.. well... it installs the driver and then asks to restart the computer for the changes to take effect.. and during the restart it either hangs at the the windows loading screen or doesn't even get to the bios.. just a black screen
 
hmmm, thats odd. Well it doesn't really sound like a hardware problem to me. It sounds more like a coincidence. I'd try to reinstall windows on it and see if that will get you going. If that doesn't work then it probably is hardware after all.
 
the weird thing that there are no sounds at all... not even the standard beep you get when you boot up. i already said that under the sound properties it says that there are no devices installed. and when i finally installed the new driver it's giving me "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" so it sounds like the wrong driver, but that came right off of dell's website so it should be the right one. i also tried installing a couple older revisions of that driver but again no good.. so i honestly don't know what to do. i don't really want to reinstall windows that's kind of a last resort
any other suggestions?
 
have you tried totally removing the device (deleting it out of device manager) then restart your computer and have it re-detect the device. Install the newest drivers for the device when your computer restarts. Maybe that will fix it. If not you could try getting a PCMCIA sound card. If it's actually a hardware failure that should make it work again.
 
to be perfectly honest i'm not even seeing the device, all i have under sound, video and game controllers are audio codecs, legacy audio drivers, legacy video capture devices, media control devices and video codecs. that's it. nothing about my actual sound card.. am i just looking in the wrong place or is there supposed to be something different there
and as far as the PCMCIA sound cards... do you know where i can get one cheap? i looked on newegg.com and the cheapest one that i saw was like 500 bucks
 
huh so here's a twist... everything says that i have a crystal CS4205 card.. i looked at my girlfriend's computer who has the exact same thing... she has the same card listed in the bios but she has way different drivers. she has some weird intel 82801 ca/cam ac'97 audio controller... so what's the deal? will it work if i copy her files over? and if so what files do i need to copy because i'm trying to find an .inf file or an .ini file and so far nothing has popped up.
any suggestions?
 
well if it's now showing up in device manager then it either went bad or it is disabled in your bios. unless of course you have any unknown devices in your list in device manager.
 
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