AboutSean Oriyano Expertise I can answer questions relating to installing, configuring, deploying and managing most versions of Windows. I can also answer questions dealing with securing and managing Enterprise level deployments of both client and server versions of Windows including Vista and Server 2008
Experience I consult and instruct on various Microsoft products including the Windows client and server line. I also worked on official Microsoft courseware for Vista, SharePoint and Server 2008
My PC was running fine, except for the very occasional crash, over the last few months. Suddenly overnight, however, without my seeming to have done anything wrong,I'm faced with no sound coming from my PC. I use headphones, but when I disconnect them, there's still no familiar starting-up sound - so it seems unlikely to be due to worn-out headphones. Yet, I've triple-checked every possible sound-/volume-setting (on my Windows Media-Player/Cyberlink DVD Player, the general sound-settings of my Windows XP system, and I don't seem to have accidentally pressed the "Mute" button, anywhere, let alone reduced any volume-/sound-setting to zero. I'm wondering how to find out the error and fix it . I've already tried System-Restore, to set my PC back to the evening before, but that didn't work, so I returned back to my PC's original setting. The really annoying thing is that everything else is working fine on my PC, with Windows Media-Player still faithfully playing music(albeit without any sound). My real worry is that the soundcard has somehow been damaged(yet I didn't touch the computer - if anything, it's always the headphones which malfunction instead, and that night I may have stepped on them - yet,with no sound from the PC when starting it up(without headphones plugged in), I can't see how that could be. How do I track this down and fix it?
(for some reason I turned off the Monitor-speakers ages back, but don't know how to reactivate them as I somehow managed to block the use of it - that's also an issue)
Answer Hi Geoff,
Check two things (which you can look up how to access in your help file on XP). Check device manager to see if you have a device that's failing and then also check your event log to see if anything is reported in there indicates a problem.
