Acer Aspire SOUND problem. ALC888

[jamesonc]

okay so i have an acer aspire am5100-u5300a. no more then 2 months old. and oh...get this, even though its under warranty best buy says its 59.99 for a diagnostics fee and then will go from there. well this pc was under 500 so im not about to spend crazy amounts of money for a computer like this. also, no help from acer or realtek. sorry, forgot to mention this is an audio problem. i have no sound. under device manager it shows up, the computer knows that there is a sound device/card. but no sound. any help would be much appreciated. have done a system restore, have backed up everything and started from scratch. no luck. and it seems to be the last time it worked was before i ran a microsoft live one care scan or whatever they call it. thanks in advance for help.

-Jameson

Is there a ? or ! in Device Manager next to your audio?
Also do you have XP or Vista as an OS?
You can go to Acer and try reinstalling your audio driver. Input your model and the driver you want.
http://www.acerpanam.com/flex/acerdr...TOKEN=18949776
The first Realtek is for XP the second, Vista. I don't believe the other two are for your model.

Set a Restore point and uninstall your Realtek through Add/Remove Programs, first, before installing the new audio

[jamesonc]

hello there. thanks for responding. and actually you see in device manager there is no ??? or any !!!!. im running vista. when i right click on sound icon and go to playback tab. the speakers are greyed out and it says nothing is plugged in.

Do you have a recovery partition? If you do, your Recovery Manager may give you the option to restore drivers. Try that before downloading and installing the drivers
But it seems to be a driver problem.

[jamesonc]

well acer has something called acer empowering technology and you could either start from there or even burn a copy onto a dvd. that way you have a backup of your original apps/drivers. i have tried this and well....no luck. if it shows up under device manager and it shows up under that everest program. is there anyway possible that this is a hardware issue? thanks!

-Jameson

It's possible but hard to tell without actually trying to reinstall your drivers first.
Also take a look in Device Manager>System and see if the UAA is listed there (it may have a different name but look for anything relating to audio or Realtek there)

[jamesonc]

okay, so this is wierd. at least wierd to me, considering i thought after reading your last post that i had already done all this. i did what you said and then when pc was done restarting the SPEAKERS under the playback tab was not greyed out anymore. still no sound though. and i have speakers that work. so now what? ahhh....im just a nerd who wants to watch the nasa channel on here. damn! also, whats the UAA ?

The UAA is the Microsoft Universal Audio Architecture Bus Driver and is needed if you have HD sound.(which your specs say you have)
In my Device Manager , it is listed as the HD Audio Controller (again in System, not in Audio, Video, and Game controllers)
It is supposed to be included with Realtek driver installs but sometimes it isn't there and sometimes it doesn't install.

Also check, the Windows Audio service.
Go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services
Scroll down the list of services until you find the Windows Audio service.
Right click on it and choose Properties.
Make sure it is set to Automatic and Start is checked.