No Sound After Installing Vista SP2

I have a Lenovo T500 Laptop - model: 2242-CTO


Yesterday, I tried installing SP2. Windows crashed during the install and when I restarted, the sound problems began.

There is a little red "x" in front of my speaker icon on my taskbar and I have no sound. The driver says it is working properly but I cannot adjust the audio levels through the driver properties.

I cannot use the buttons on my keyboard to adjust the sound. I have tried uninstalling a reinstalling the driver and that didn't work. I also spent about an hour on the phone with Lenovo but all they could think of was to tell me to try the driver reinstall again.

From a google search, this seems to be a common problem but none of the available solutions have worked for me.

I have also tried this microsoft "solution":

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948481


Can someone please help me. Majorgeeks has been real helpful in the past. I really need to have audio on this machine and I do not want to do a factory restore.

 

Hi! It seems that many folks are having a similar issue with the audio in the Lenovo T500 series of laptops with Vista. I found this thread in the Lenovo forums and it's fairly recent and still 'in progress' so you may want to check it out from time to time. Have you tried a system restore back to a time when the sound was working? If that wasn't successful, all I can personally suggest is to uninstall the current sound driver if it's listed in the Programs list in the Control Panel. Reboot the PC, then install the chipset driver, reboot, and install the audio driver. I hope this helps.
Chipset download link: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70315
Audio download link: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70595

(I see that it's the Conexant audio driver; in my experience, the Conexant audio drivers have been generally troublesome and I have had more issues with Conexant sound drivers than I've had with ALL other sound drivers combined)

As a cheap temporary alternative, you can buy a USB adapter that has a headphone/speaker jack and a microphone jack and it's about the size of a flash drive. This USB adapter is actually a sound card. So you'd disable the on board Conexant audio first, then install this USB audio adapter. They have 'em all over EBay for under $5 (link: http://cgi.ebay.com/5-1-Sound-card-...ards?hash=item4ceabf2b7f&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14 ). I've used one of these in the past and while the sound (obviously) isn't top notch, it's much better than I was expecting, and for under $5, it's a heck of a deal. Plug in a set of powered speakers or headphones, and you're good to go.

Good luck!