Vista/WMP11 Audio problems.. please help

So I just installed Vista Home Prem and everything was great except one thing. I was not getting any sound out of the speakers after I installed my drivers and everything right from the dell site. I installed some updates rebooted and the audio began to work fine upon loading the OS. Then about 20 minutes later I'm getting absolutely no sound. WMP 11 is giving me "Windows media encountered a Problem while playing the file. I also installed K-Lite to see if it was a decoder problem. Nothing seems to help :confused2: Any thought/suggestions greatly appreciated.

Mike

 

Try opening that same file with VLC. If it works in there something with your codecs is messed up even though you tried KLite. Report back once you've tried that please.

 

No, it shows its playing but there is no audio. Also, no default windows sounds either.

 

What type of Dell are you running? Have you checked the BIOS to make sure you haven't disabled on-board sound?

 

E1505
No I haven't But I will right now

 

Did the update.. didn't fix the problem. Still no audio and an error in wmp

 

You updated the BIOS to what rev? It seems A14 is the newest.

Edit:

Are there any errors (question marks or exclamation points) in your Device Manager?

 

A14 is correct, only check mark is on my Ethernet controller

 

I'd try an older version of your audio drivers. Oh, and windows update of course.

 

Well those drivers were working for about a year and then comes vista and they are no good... Ive done windows update also

 

Just keep plugging in the audio plug to different parts of the connections and turning the volume up and down and changing settings in your sound control.

Happaned to me when I went with alienware drivers, Vista sound drivers are actually better than normal drivers.

May want to reinstall.

Really odd thing now too... When installing the alienware drivers, the sound is now reversed... I turn the volume knob to turn it down, like it used too, and volume goes up...

 

I played around with the ports with some headphones and all im getting is static/ fuzz noise. Do you know how to do a system restore in Vista?

 

Do you mean that the sound was working before the driver update, or is this a clean install? If it is the former, you can try to roll back to the previous driver in Device Manager and see if that helps.

 

Just enter the vista dvd into your drive, have it boot up in the dvd (reset), instead of installing, go to repiar your pc, and then go down to system restore.

Restore it to before you did this.

 

no I installed the new driver and everything was fine...then it stopped working out of no where and I rebooted and nothing with sound works. Also wmp wont even attempt to play audio of video files while vlc plays them with out sound. It was a clean install

 

Im not having trouble watching flash video in Firefox and IE7 . Both have flash video installed and were working fine before all this sound crap came up. The video is coming in frame rates of about one frame a second...

 

Anyone?...