No sound on Dell Dimension 4400

I have no sound coming from my computer at all. Whenever I try to play a music file it pops this up

"Windows Media Player cannot play the file because there is a problem with your sound device. There might not be a sound device installed on your computer, it might be in use by another program, or it might not be functioning properly."

So then I went into my device manager then my sound tab. The
"microsoft kernel wave audio mixer" had a yellow tag. So I clicked its' properties and it said something about it not working right.

After that I went into control panel and then "Sounds and Audio Devices". The volume tab said no audio device. Device volume was all grayed out as well as speaker settings. It also says in other tabs no playback device.

It will let me play videos but there won't be any sound.

Also if I try to play any kind of game there is also no sound as well. My speakers work and they are plugged in correctly. My sound card is built into the motherboard. I've tried updating the chipset and it did nothing. It said update was not needed.

So I did a restart and the problem still was not fixed. I went back into device manager and the "Microsoft kernel wave audio mixer" was gone.

I then scanned for hardware changes *plug and play* and nothing was found new.

I then installed Driver Genius Professional Edition to see what drivers I needed to update. I updated my chipset and audio. Still nothing worked. So then I uninstalled the SoundMAX Audio driver thing. Still nothing after a reset.

So any help here?


BTW I USE WINDOWS XP NOT VISTA

I've attached the everest report.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

First, install your chipset drivers, available from this link. Restart the PC when the install has finished. Then download the sound driver from this link. Again, restart the PC when it has finished. If this doesn't restore the audio, you can run the system file checker which has fixed similar problems in the past. Click Start, click Run, and type cmd and press Enter. In the black window that opens, type sfc /purgecache and press Enter. Let that do its thing; it takes maybe a minute or two. Now put your XP install disc in the CD drive. When the big blue window opens, click Exit. Then type sfc /scannow in the black window and press Enter. This may take some time so be patient. When it's done, type exit and press Enter and remove the XP disc from the CD drive and restart the PC. If this doesn't restore the audio, let us know and we'll try some other things.... good luck!!!
:-D

Happy New Year! :drink :dancer :wine

(there is a space between the "sfc" and the "/" in the commands above; there are no other spaces in the commands)

 

I did everything you said up this point. Whenever I typed sfc /purgecache it didn't do anything for a sec. So while I was waiting I put the cd in and exited the blue screen. Then I checked back at the black window and it said this..

"Windows File Protection could not purge the file cache.

The specific error code is 0x00000002 [The system cannot find the file specified
j.

C:\Documents and Settings\User>

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222193
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310747

The 2nd link shows how to use the sfc command to scan in other ways. You can try using sfc /scanonce and the system will run the System File Checker at the next reboot. It's odd that the "purgecache" errored out. I have never seen that happen. It could be that the "sfc" command is no longer on your PC; that would explain the error "The system cannot find the file specified". You might consider performing a safe repair Windows install. Follow the steps in this link.

 

The sfc /scanonce command worked. After I rebooted it did it's thing. However, I did have to put the windows CD in when it popped up.

So far it still is doing the same thing. Same error message when I try to load a music file and still no audio device detected. I'm beginning to think that the on-board audio card itself has gone bad.

 

Hmmmm.... at this point, you should consider a safe Windows re-install. You can reload Windows with no data loss, but occasionally when the re-install has finished, all the desktop icons and shortcuts are gone. All the programs and documents and data is still there, just nothing runs as it should. This is fairly rare and usually only happens when user accounts are corrupt, or if the software hive or system hive is corrupt. If you want to try a safe reload, follow the steps in this article.