F3Ka and its front audio

Hello there.
recently i've bought myself this nifty little machine to waste some time...and more recently i've noticed that the front audio socket does not seem to send any signal. the microphone socket works fine, the integrated sound boxes mute themselves when i plug in my headphones, but still no sound on the headphones themselves.
tried different headphones, but it was no use.
tried to uninstall & reinstall the most recent realtek drivers (been forwarded to the right downloads on the asus support site... tried "V6.0.1.5477" as well as "V6.0.1.5374") which didnt help either.

What else can i do to fix this?
Or should I simply send it back to the retailer? :/

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

Sounds like hardware.

But before deciding it is, how about trying a different OS? Like a Live Linux distro, Knoppix www.knopper.org or SLAX www.slax.org

If it works fine in Linux, it's software/drivers. If it does the same thing, it's most likely hardware and you'll need to RMA.

 

Hello,
I found a solution in the Internet on newegg.com:
"Other Thoughts: If your front audio jack has stopped working, please read this before you call ASUS or go with other drastic measures to fix it: If you entered the BIOS and turned off the startup chime that is installed, this also disables the front jacks of the laptop (who the hell knows why). Turning the startup chime back on will re-enable your front jacks. Obviously we will need a BIOS update to fix this problem. So please get on it ASUS!"

and this works on my F3Ka.

cu

Joe-nw

 

Looks like ASUS doesn't care about its customers. The latest BIOS update doesn't fix this problem, and many have that problem with the audio.

 

That's a very good piece of information!

Indeed, ASUS sometimes have very annoying bugs in their BIOSes, and they're never eager to fix them... The thing is, I have a feeling the other brands are, on average, just as bad