BleepingComputer.com: Audio doesn't work and cannot play videos

Ok my grandfather says that for about the last few months his computer would work fine but after a few hours the audio would stop working and it no longer could play videos in any format. whether its in windows media player or on youtube.com. he used to be able to reboot and it would be fine for a few more hours. now it doesn't work at all. he tried a clean install and it would be fine for a few weeks then it would degrade over time again. I thought it could be the hardware going bad but why would it get better with a clean install then slowly degrade again? I have no idea what the problem could be. and suggestions I could try?

I was thinking about doing a registry cleaner (Yea I know bad idea but since he can do a clean install anytime not much to lose) but I figured it would take a lot longer for the registry to get messed up then a few weeks. I'm leaning towards an update but I would have figured an update would have made it stop working right away.

I suggest you take a look in two places:

a. Event Viewer

b. Device Manager.

How To Use Event Viewer - http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic40108.html

You are only interested in errors, not information items. Look through the whole list, each tab. If you see an error that indicates it has anything to do with audio or sound...double-click on the line item and examine the detail.

Post the details for such in your next post.

Start/Run...type devmgmt.msc and hit Enter. That gets you to Device Manager. If you see any yellow or red markings by anything...post the detail for that item.

Louis