Series 7 audio issue - I'm stumped and I'd really appreciate some help!

Hi everyone, my daughter is back from Uni with her poorly laptop, model number NP700Z5A-S01UK.
I've been trying to resolve all of the issues, but the latest has me stumped so I'd be really grateful for any suggestions.

Firstly, the background is that: the laptop was physically dropped at some point and from what I could determine, the internal hard drive was not in good shape (backup of partition failing with read error) although booting OK to windows and on the face of it 100% functional. I understand that sound was working OK previously. Therefore I bit the bullet and bought an SSD, using Acronis Trueimage to clone the disk. Everything has been looking fine. I ran sfc /scannow which repaired some files. I've since been going through the system drivers to bring them up to latest versions - via the software update utility from Samsung.

There is no sound from the laptop. The playback devices menu is showing only the hands free bluetooth audio, no other devices shown, even with "show disabled" and "show disconnected devices" checkboxes ticked. Uninstalling then reinstalling the realtek drivers from samsung results in an error, everything seems to be suggesting that physically the internal speaker cannot be detected.

I am trying to establish if this is a hardware or software problem, I guess it is possible that I've caused the problem whilst physically swapping the internal disk, however I think that this is unlikely, as I was very careful. Still, I am now wondering if the windows installation is corrupted, although I have no evidence to prove this other than the state of the device manager, screenshot attached.

Any pointers would be appreciated
Thanks
Nige

Edit: clarified model number
Edit: made my description of the error slightly more specific & uploaded playback devices screenshot

 

Grrr... I'm usually OK at solving stuff like this. I've been through all the samsung drivers now and reinstalled.
I managed to get the Realtek driver to install, now am not convinced it's the root cause, something else perhaps?
Device manager has 2 issues, see screenshot. It has to be associated with the high definition audio controller problem....screenshot shows the error code:

Plugging in headphones into laptop does nothing - not recognised.
Audio troubleshooter says the speaker/headse/headphone is unplugged.
Windows audio and audio endpoint services are running.

Really strange...

 

OK, solved it thanks to a solution elsewhere on the net.

I was clutching at straws and attempted the registry hack within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
HDAudBus start param was set to 4 (disabled) so I changed it to 1.
Rebooted, everything came back to life...

I appreciate that this is one of those choices where, given the background, I should probably have accepted from the outset that it would be quicker to simply reinstall windows from scratch and then rebuild from a solid foundation. However I *think* I'm somewhere close to a stable and working build now.

Now I just need to sort out the updated switchable AMD graphics card driver - doesn't seem to play with youtube very nicely...! Last time I ended up researching custom drivers from Leshcat (I think?!).