Software tower · floor

Why is my sound not working, and whose order to follow

Why is my sound not working has an unusual property: the manufacturers do not publish lists of things to try, they publish sequences, and they say so. Microsoft writes “The tips are listed in order”; Dell writes “Follow the steps in order”. The trouble is that the sequences do not agree, and one check that can silence a computer before Windows even loads appears at opposite ends of two of them and not at all in the third.

Look at where the BIOS check sits. Dell puts it in the first bullet of Step 1 of 7. HP puts it fifth of five. Microsoft never mentions it. That is not a small difference of emphasis: a reader who follows Microsoft’s thirteen steps to the end, faithfully, is never told to check whether the sound hardware is switched on below the operating system.

This page is not saying Microsoft is wrong to leave it out — its pages are about Windows, and firmware settings are the machine maker’s territory. It is saying that the reader does not know that, and follows the most authoritative-looking list to the bottom.

Inside Microsoft’s own pages there are three more disagreements, and all three can be checked by counting.

The RPC one deserves a sentence on its own, because it is the kind of detail that decides whether a step works. Restarting two of three related services is not the same operation as restarting three, and a reader who used the page that lists two will conclude the step did not help — while the page that lists three is describing something slightly different under the same heading.

There is one more thing all these lists share, and it is the reason so many of them fail: they are all about the system. The sound may not be a system problem at all.

So the order this page suggests, assembled from the published ones rather than invented. First, does anything play at all? If system sounds work and one program is silent, go straight to the Volume mixer and that program’s own output device — the system lists will not find it. If nothing plays anywhere, check the output device selected in Sound settings, then work through your own manufacturer’s sequence rather than a generic one, and if it is a desktop or a laptop whose speakers never worked, the BIOS or UEFI check belongs near the beginning, where Dell puts it, not at the end.

What this page will not do is give you a single ordered list of its own. Three manufacturers publish three orders for their own hardware, and replacing them with a fourth invented here would be adding to the problem rather than describing it.

It will not tell you to reinstall the driver first. Microsoft’s two pages disagree about which direction to move the driver, and doing the irreversible half of that pair before the reversible half is the wrong way round.

And it will not recommend an external sound card or a USB adapter. Those are a genuine answer to some of these faults, none has been tested here, and this is a category where an untested recommendation is simply an advertisement.

What this tower will not do

It will not publish a fourth ordered list. Three manufacturers already publish three for their own hardware, and inventing another one adds to the confusion this page is about.

It will not tell you to update or roll back the driver as a first move. Microsoft’s own two pages point in opposite directions on that, and one of the two directions is harder to undo.

It will not recommend an external sound card or USB audio adapter. Untested here.

And it carries no affiliate links, including for speakers and headphones, which is what a page ranking for this question would exist to sell. What holds instead is simple: the three orders, the counts and the contradictions above were taken by reading each manufacturer page in full, and the number of steps in each list is a count rather than an impression.