This is a regular support request we get here at PC Whirled and it’s not just unique to laptops. It’s a complex issue to trouble shoot as well with no single magic solution. Depending on the make of sound card you have installed or whether you’re using the onboard sound controller on your motherboard the answer is never straight forward.

The basics explained

Ok so, first of all it’s not the music that has left your laptop (we always have a good chuckle when we hear that suggested) it is of course the band that plays the music. Most people don’t realise that sound cards are actually powered by very tiny bands and the quality of sound card performance is dependant on the quality of the band resident on the card. In future posts we’ll talk further about this but for now you just need to grasp the tiny band concept.

The day the music died

We’ve all been there, you boot up your laptop first thing of a morning eager to dive into a heavy day of social bookmarking and tag cloud surfing and the usual windows startup music doesn’t play. “That’s odd” you think, “maybe I just didn’t hear it over the hard drive grinding noise”, so you try playing one of your mp3s and still nothing.

So, What has happened?

Well it’s quite simple really, overnight the band have decided to leave. There are many reasons why this might happen and we’ll look at some potential reasons along with some potential fixes in later posts.

A temporary fix

There are two possible temporary fixes,

1. Buy a new laptop and threw the other out. The new laptop will come pre-configured with new soundcard and therefore a new resident band.
2. Have someone sit by your side using a different laptop with working sound and instruct them to mirror your actions thus creating the missing audio