My friend brought me his Toshiba A65 S126 laptop in which the sound suddenly stopped working. I've checked every conceivable issue known to God and man. Drivers, codecs, hardware profiles, multimedia controllers/drivers, settings, you name it. I went to every website and downloaded 500 new drivers, uninstalled, re-installed and change BIOS settings until I was frustrated enough to tell him to throw this 1-year old machine into the trash and get a new one (on-baord sound dead?)

The original drivers were Realtek AC97 and I've been to the Toshiba site, the realtek site and about 30 more to no avail. No sound from the speakers or the headphone jack.

Your forum is my last effort before I give up (and I never do).

Help, please.

Hello, go to start then run type services.msc scroll down and make sure windows audio is started and anything with realtek is also started.

If that doesn't work, have you tried uninstalling the drivers completely, deleting the relevent entry in the programfiles folder, then doing a registry clean then a reboot then install the drivers from the manufactures website.

Hope this helps

Thanks for the suggestions but I've tried that too - no luck. The weird thing is taht when I turn the voulme knob, i hear static in the speakers so I know they work. Just can't get the computer to believe that.

I'd suspect the sound card itself - can you find a USB sound device to try?

Yes, after all of my efforts, I too suspect the on-board sound section. He intends to trash the machine and buy a new one. Welcome to the world of planned obsolesence. Thanks for teh help anyway.