Laptop gone Deaf

Last to last night was a bit frustration night as my Laptop was deaf.
Late night sat in front of Laptop trying to listen to a podcast sent from a friend.
Accessing my Gmail clicked on the link which a friend had sent. The file was running but there was no sound output. I was Shocked at that point. Just before the previous day it was working fine. Hmmm what to do… at first I checked my volume control- it was set to high, I cross checked in the control panel-> sound and audio device->volume, audio and voice tab are grayed off . I did a restart to the machine, but nothing worked. Called a friend who had configured my system, he gave some task to perform on the system, did that, even then nothing worked. By then it was already too late for my sleep. Rubbing my eyes too and fro, yawning broadly, did some Google. With the various solutions on the web I tried one-by one. But the result was negative. I was really frustrated at that moment. By then I saw the watch it was half past one. I left everything there put a full stop for my search then shut down my system and went for sleep. Next day in the office the audio problem of the system was still fishing in my mind. Again clinched on the web search, saw a couple of them. A saw a post which gave me a thought that it might settle my problem, immediately copied that paragraph to the mail and sent it to my personal mail ID. After 6 went home freshened up myself, had snack and straight away went to open my laptop tried the solution which I had in my mailbox. Of about 5.-6 steps lead me the way. And laptop was back with the sound output. It is no more deaf now.

Here are the tasks which I performed to get back the sound output on my HP Compaq Presario C700:

1. Installed the audio driver
Conexant CX20549-12 High Definition Audio Driver
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp36001-36500/sp36090.exe

2. When you install the driver it will give an error message [Media device not found]. Don’t get fooled by this. Now it’s your turn to take control of the system.

3. Open your “Device Manager”. Look for “High Definition Audio Device”. You will find a yellow mark beside it indicating that the devices is not working properly. Right click and choose to install driver. Don’t let installation wizard do any thing on its own.

4. Don’t let Windows to search for drivers. Choose advanced option of installing driver by choosing the location on your own.

5. Then choose “Audio, Video, Games Controller” and then don’t choose any driver from the list given by Windows. Click “Have disk”.

6. Now you need to look for a “swsetup” folder in your “C:” drive. This is the drive where HP drivers have been extracted automatically. Look for “sp36090″ [the number of the HP driver] folder in it. If you don’t find the folder in “swsetup” look for the folder in “C:” drive. You will find one “.inf” file in the folder [Don't go into the other folders within 'sp36090' folder]. This is the driver file for your audio device. Select it and proceed irrespective of any warning by Windows.

When I searched the web, I figured out that it was the problem caused by the automatic windows update. By chance I must have clicked on the icon which comes in the right hand side of the system tray.

well now I am enjoying listening to the podcast as usual.