M17x - Audio quits after a while. Service still running, device showing good.

Hello,

I have a new-to-me M17X (mid 2009). The audio will quit after a while (both internal/external), seemingly randomly. When this happens, I can press the touch-volume control and the on-screen icon comes up, but no bars are showing. The speaker does not show muted. I check the Device Manager and everything looks ok there. I check the services, and Windows Audio shows it is running.

It doesn't seem to matter the audio source when it quits... browser, media player, windows sounds, etc are all not heard.

If I shut down the computer, I will hear the "windows exit" sound fine, and when I reboot, the audio will be back on everything. I noticed that when the audio quits, I can restart the service and the audio will immediately return. The bars show on the on-screen volume control. The driver shows current (6.10.0.6233).

I've poked around the threads some and found several references to "that audio problem", but I never found what "that" was, or if this is "that".

Thanks!

 

Update: The same thing is now happening on my home desktop computer, same basic symptoms, so now I am looking in the direction of a software issue since I use the same software packages on both computers. I'm starting to suspect Skype, since I recently updated it on the home machine.

 

Hmm strange.. I don't think it's a hardware issue... I'm not sure but does your M17x have a creative or realtek audio chip? Updating to the newer driver might help..

 

It has the Realtek set. It's happened a couple more times recently, again the same symptoms. The CPU and Memory don't look very busy when it's not working, and again, just stopping and restarting the service makes the audio come back. I think it will be a long troubleshooting process, since it doesn't happen that often, so I can't tie it to any specific action. The only common things running at the same time are Skype (text chat only, not telephone), Firefox and Thunderbird.